Since then, she has rarely had time away from doctors and has missed most of seventh grade.
Doctors diagnosed the 12-year-old girl with aplastic anemia, a rare condition in which the bone marrow stops producing enough red and white blood cells to keep the body healthy.
Doctors say she needs a bone-marrow transplant, and since there were no matches in her family, they are asking the community for help.
On Sunday, a bone-marrow drive will be held at Loma Linda Park's Community Center in Goodyear from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The park is at 420 E. Loma Linda Blvd.
Driscill's mother, Rosa, said they need people of Hispanic descent ages 18 and older to help. She is concerned that misunderstandings about donating bone marrow may prevent some people from getting tested.
"It's so easy to save a life," Rosa Alvarez said. "If people understood that, they would do it in a heartbeat. They would do it for not only my daughter, but for others."
Students at Driscill's school in Avondale also want to get the word out. Seventh-graders at El?eo C. F?ix School are frustrated that they are not old enough to help their friend.
"Almost the whole class wants to go help," 13-year-old Jamie Espinoza said. "I told my parents and brother to go. I told them a girl needed a transplant at the school. I told them she needed help."
Samantha Talavera, another classmate, also said she feels helpless.
When Driscill makes it to school, Samantha has lunch with her and tries to help her forget about her illness.
She also asked her family to go on Sunday. And she continues to tell everyone she can think of who qualifies.
"I wish I was 18," Samantha said. "My whole class feels that way. We all want to be 18 so we can give her blood. It's messed up what she has to go through. She's the only kid I know who has to go through something like this."
Bone marrow drive set for Saturday in South City
Finding a match especially difficult for minorities
By Todd R. Brown, STAFF WRITER
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO — One morning in May, Wayne "Louie" Tuaolo woke up to find blood on his pillowcase and sheets.
The 24-year-old figured he just had a bad toothache, but the same thing happened the next day. That Saturday, Tuaolo felt very weak, and the next day, the Marin City man felt too sick to go to church — and his symptoms took a severe turn.
"He knew something's really wrong because he's peeing blood," recalled Tuaolo's mother, Fafo Fa'ataui, 43.
Wayne's wife, Alyssa, 22, called Kaiser, and doctors learned that the father of a 3-year-old had aplastic anemia, a rare condition in which the body produces too few blood cells.
As with leukemia, one treatment is a stem-cell transplant, and Wayne's family is now in search of a donor who shares his Samoan ethnicity.
But, as with other minorities, finding the right match for bone marrow that can produce disease-fighting white blood cells and oxygen-carrying red blood cells is a challenge of its own.
Asia Blume, 24, of Foster City, is helping Wayne's mother organize a minority marrow drive from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday at Smelly Mel's Plumbing & Rooter Service, 300 Shaw Road in South San Francisco, where Fa'ataui works as a dispatcher.
Blume, an outreach coordinator for the Asian American Donor Program, said several factors reduce Wayne's chances of finding a genetic match through the national marrow registry.
"All minorities are not well-represented,"Blume said. "Seventy-five percent of the registry is Caucasian."
The registry identifies several genetic markers called human leukocyte antigens, or HLAs, which distinguish the body's own cells so its immune system attacks only foreign cells.
And when it comes to bone marrow, race is more than skin deep.
"What people don't realize is the average person has a 1-in-20,000 chance of finding a match," Blume said. "For minorities, that chance is actually much lower because of that unique heritage."
Matching for HLAs is particularly hard for Asians and Pacific Islander patients because those are umbrella terms for an array of ethnic groups.
"There is no real 'Asian.' Japanese are completely different from Thai people, who are completely different from Samoan people," Blume said.
A major innovation that Blume and other outreach workers hope will swell the number of minorities who register is using cheek swabbing. Since April, the National Marrow Donor Program has been using the noninvasive technique instead of drawing blood to type potential donors.
Christine Marelich, 35, said the change has given her hope that her daughter, Brittany Hill-Marelich, will find the help she needs: The 16-year-old was diagnosed with leukemia in February 2005.
Brittany had four rounds of chemotherapy and is in remission. She also is back in a Redwood City apartment after several months of homelessness; her mother, a nanny, only recently found an employer who would let Marelich take off work to care for her daughter.
But Marelich said Brittany's doctors at Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital said her only hope if she relapses is to find a marrow donor.
And Brittany's chances are complicated by her unusual ethnicity: Her mother is white, and her father is black. Marelich said no African-Americans showed up at her last registration drive.
"Honestly, I'm feeling that they're afraid of needles," she said. "It's 10 seconds on each side of the mouth. It's like brushing your teeth."
Fa'ataui, who lives in San Francisco's Bayview District, said her employer told her she can have ongoing marrow drives at the company's South City office.
Speaking by phone from Kaiser Permanente in San Rafael, where she goes for extended weekend visits with her son, Fa'ataui said she tries to put up a tough front, "talking with him and my family, trying to be strong for him."
Sitting alone in Wayne's room while doctors checked his heart elsewhere in the hospital, she talked calmly, with just the barest hint of a quiver in her voice.
"It's hard. I don't try to break down in front of him," she said. "I don't want to bring my son down."
Contact the Asian American Donor Program at (800) 59-DONOR or visit http://www.aadp.org. Check out the National Marrow Donor Program online at http://www.marrow.org.
Staff writer Todd R. Brown covers the North County. Reach him at (650) 348-4473 or tbrown@sanmateocountytimes.com.
