The Why: One Stranger Said Yes, and I Kept Walking

I know you cannot bargain with God. But when I believed I might lose my infant granddaughter, I tried.

Late at night, holding Jada in my arms, I made the same silent plea again and again: Please, take my life and give this innocent baby hers. I have lived a long life. Bless this child with the opportunity to live.

I know many people who have watched someone they love suffer will understand that instinct. The desire to protect can become so profound that you would give your own life if it meant sparing theirs. I could not enter Jada’s body and fight the leukemia. I could not make my bone marrow match hers. I could only remain beside her and ask for help.

What saved Jada was not a trade of one life for another. It was a chain of human decisions: a nurse who noticed a mark on a newborn’s skin; medical teams who kept working when the margin for error had narrowed; researchers and a drug company that made a treatment available in a crisis; and, finally, a man in Germany who had joined a donor program before Jada was even born.

His name was Torsten Huber. His decision gave Jada a future. It gave my gratitude a direction.

The Tiny Red Dots

Jada Bascom was born on April 16, 2007, at Holy Family Hospital in Spokane, Washington. She weighed six pounds, seven ounces. Soon after her birth, a nurse saw tiny red dots on her skin—petechiae, tiny spots caused by bleeding under the skin—and carried her away for testing. Within hours, Jada needed her first blood transfusion.

At about one month old, she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, or AML. The American Cancer Society describes AML as a fast-growing cancer that begins in the bone marrow, where the body makes blood cells. It can move quickly into the blood and usually requires treatment right away. In a newborn, the diagnosis felt almost impossible to comprehend.

Jada endured round after round of chemotherapy and hundreds of blood transfusions. During treatment, she developed veno-occlusive disease, a serious liver complication. According to our family’s account and contemporary reporting, Gentium supplied the drug Defibrotide on a compassionate-use basis. Our family credits that treatment with helping Jada through the crisis so she could continue toward a transplant.

There is a moment from that time that has never left me. When Jada was finally moved out of intensive care and back to pediatric oncology, Issa and I smiled at each other through the bars of the metal crib as the transport team rolled her down the hallway. Who could imagine feeling joy on the way to an oncology ward? Yet we did. Oncology meant she had lived another day. It was the strangest joy.

The doctors had made the stakes clear: Jada needed a matched donor.

No one in our family was a suitable match. No suitable donor was identified in the United States. The search widened to Europe. At the time, news coverage described a combined search pool of roughly 11 million registered people. For Jada, one suitable match emerged.

The Man We Did Not Know

In the spring of 2006, almost a year before Jada was born, Torsten and his girlfriend, Michaela, went to a donor drive in southern Germany. The drive had been organized for a woman in their region who had leukemia. Torsten was not her match, but his tissue information remained available through DKMS, the donor organization with which he had registered.

In October 2007, a letter arrived. Torsten might match a patient. Further testing confirmed it. He was not told Jada’s name. He knew that a patient with leukemia needed the donation.

He said yes.

Doctors collected marrow from Torsten, and his donated cells were carried to the United States. On November 27, 2007, when Jada was seven months old, she received them in a transplant. The infusion itself could not promise an ending. Her body still had to accept the cells, and recovery would take time. But the search was over. The person we had needed existed, had registered, had answered, and had given.

Our family still marks November 27 as Jada’s rebirth day.

When people ask why Torsten registered, his answer is almost startling in its simplicity: he had registered to help somebody. There was no grand prediction attached to that choice. He could not have known that, a year later, a baby in Washington would need him. He did not have to know.

That is one of the deepest truths of donor registration: the decision comes first. The name may come years later.

Gratitude Needed Somewhere to Go

Jada survived. Today she is 19 and building the life I once begged for her to have. The Foundation’s current public account describes her as a healthy young woman, cancer-free and thriving.

Relief did not erase what our family had seen. I kept thinking about families who were still waiting and still searching.

In 2009, I founded the Jada Bascom Foundation. It grew from gratitude—for Torsten, for the nurse who saw the first sign, for Jada’s medical teams, for the people who developed and supplied her treatment, and for everyone who carried our family through the first two years of Jada’s life. My gratitude needed somewhere to go.

The Foundation’s role is straightforward: we raise awareness, encourage eligible people to consider joining an official bone marrow or blood stem cell registry, and help people find the right registry for their country. We do not operate a registry, perform tissue typing, collect cells, or decide who is eligible. Those responsibilities belong to organizations such as NMDP in the United States and donor organizations and registries around the world.

I wanted to talk to people face to face and get the word out. I believed the best way to do that was to walk. A person arriving on foot invites a question: Why are you doing this? That question gave me the chance to tell Jada’s story.

Four Thousand Four Hundred Miles to Thank a Stranger

In October 2009, I began the first Steps to Marrow walk at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. The route took me south to Los Angeles and then across the country to New York City—about 4,400 miles over 15 months. By my count, 5,000 people joined the registry through that first walk.

I wore a reflective vest and carried what I needed. I stayed in homes, churches, motels, and places made possible by people I had only just met. In town after town, strangers offered water, food, directions, a safe place to sleep, or a room in which to hold a donor drive. The walk was never mine alone.

On January 27, 2011, after a snowstorm had covered New York, Torsten joined me and other walkers for the final three miles, beginning near the northwest corner of Central Park. The walk ended at a Midtown hotel. There, at a reception after the walk, Jada and Issa met Torsten for the first time. The donor who had made Jada’s transplant possible and the family who had searched for him finally stood in the same room.

In the days that followed, while sightseeing in Manhattan, Jada walked over to Torsten and took his hand. He later remembered them walking hand in hand on Broadway. Jada came to call him her “blood brother.” Torsten called her his “genetic twin.”

The language was tender, but the fact beneath it was physical: part of Torsten’s gift was now helping Jada make blood and immune cells. A stranger had become family in a way none of us could have anticipated.

Sea to Sea, and Then the Desert

The first walk ended, but the reason for it did not.

In 2012, I began again, this time in Kiel, Germany. I walked more than 1,000 miles over 137 days, from the Baltic Sea toward the Adriatic, through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. I wanted to thank the people and institutions whose work had crossed borders to reach Jada: DKMS in Germany; Swiss Blood Stem Cells in Switzerland; the Italian Bone Marrow Donor Registry (IBMDR) and Gentium in Italy; and the many others connected to her donor search. Torsten joined portions of that walk. The stranger we once could not name had become someone whose wedding I attended.

In early 2020, I walked a roughly 465-mile route through the Sonoran Desert, from the Yuma area toward Phoenix. That walk focused on a fact that donor organizations continue to confront: matching is based on inherited HLA markers, and the chance of finding a closely matched unrelated donor is not equal for every patient. The registry needs people from every community if more families are to have a fair chance at finding someone compatible.

The desert reduced the work to its essentials. I felt the sun on my back. I noticed an ant carrying food. I smelled the dust. I ached, I breathed, I stepped.

People often asked how I could walk so far. The honest answer was that I did not walk the whole distance at once. I took one step, then the next. I tried not to live inside the final mileage or even the end of that day’s route. I walked with gratitude for those who had helped Jada, with determination for the patients still searching, and with the hope that each of them might receive the same second chance.

The walk also taught me something about giving. Depending on strangers was not merely a hardship. It allowed other people to become part of the work. A child holding down the corner of a tent in the wind, a driver offering a safe ride, a church opening a door, a person joining a registry—each act was limited. Together, they carried the journey forward.

This is how lives are changed most often: not by one person doing everything, but by many people doing the next thing they can.

From a Hospital Crib to the Last Three Miles

Then, in 2024, I returned to the road for a Walk of Gratitude: 334 miles from Deer Park to Seattle Children’s. On June 26, Jada, Issa, my grandson Brant, and Jada’s friend Serenity joined me for the last 3.2 miles from Matthews Beach Park to the hospital.

Years earlier, Issa and I had watched an infant roll down a hospital hallway, grateful that she had survived long enough to return to oncology. Now that child was a young woman, walking beside us toward the people and the place we had come to thank.

Looking back, that feels like the greatest distance of all. Not the miles between Seattle and New York, the Baltic and the Adriatic, Yuma and Phoenix, or Deer Park and Seattle, but the distance between the future we feared in 2007 and the young woman taking those final steps in 2024.

The work also traveled beyond the roads I walked. Our family and Foundation advocated publicly for a 2018 Washington law requiring donor information for driver’s-license and identification-card applicants and a separate 2023 law encouraging bone marrow donation instruction in public schools.

The Why

This is why I continue.

I continue because I remember the thin veil between life and death, and the strange joy of a hospital hallway. I continue because somewhere, a family is waiting for a search result that will shape the rest of their lives. I continue because the person who matches them may already be alive and willing, but not yet registered.

Joining does not guarantee that you will match or donate. It is a commitment to be available for the official registry to contact if your tissue type appears compatible with a patient. If you are medically eligible and ready to make that commitment, find the official registry where you live and learn what joining involves.

No one can do everything. Each of us can decide what we are able and willing to do next.

Torsten registered. When the call came, he donated. Thousands of others have since taken a step of their own.

That is the why. That is how we keep walking.

Find the official registry for your country.