While Jonathan’s recovery is still ongoing — truly each day at a time –  we are so thrilled to be able to say that December 2010 marked his one year anniversary post-transplant! Today, he’s back in action and ready to pay it forward by helping other patients to find their bone marrow matches in the same way all of you came together to help him not so long ago.

We are getting ready to launch the 30K Friends Foundation and hope all of our loyal Team Haupters will continue their support of blood cancer awareness and helping us to grow the bone marrow registries to help other patients in need once we launch at 30kfriends.org. Stay tuned for more news on 30K Friends coming soon.

In the meantime, keep up with us on Facebook (join the new 30K Friends page!) and Twitter and certainly check back to our new website which will be launching in full soon.

Love and Thanks,
Team Haupt

Jennie Sheiman Katz was diagnosed recently with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), a cancer of the blood. She urgently needs a bone marrow transplant to survive.

Jennie is 30 years old and is pursuing a doctorate in clinical developmental psychology at Bryn Mawr College. Her dream is to one day work as a school psychologist, diagnosing and treating children with learning disabilities. Jennie is married to a loving husband, Billy, and they hope to raise a family together.

But those plans are on hold. Currently, she is undergoing chemotherapy in Philadelphia, Pa., and is hoping to find a Life-saving donor. Finding the right donor is going to be a challenge.

The search for a donor for Jennie starts with an easy and painless swab of the inside of the cheek. A testing kit can be ordered by clicking here, then clicking JOIN. Once you’ve registered you’ll be guided towards ordering a kit. You may use the sponsorship code “SWAB4JENNIE” and a testing kit will be shipped to your home or office free of charge.

If you are unable to be a donor, please consider making a donation to subsidize the cost of testing for potential donors. All donations are tax deductible and are greatly appreciated. To make a donation, please click here. When prompted to allocate your donation, please select “My Donor Circle” and then “swab4Jennie”.

Jennie needs your help. Spend 5 minutes and join the Gift of Life registry. A simple cheek swab is all it takes. You may be the miracle match Jennie has been waiting for. If you are unable to join the registry you can still help by spreading the word and by encouraging other potential donors to swab.

The only way to increase Jennie’s chances is to increase the number of donor registrants.

With heartfelt thanks,

The family and friends of Jennie Sheiman Katz

Team Haupt has had an amazing year and a half. I am so honored to have received support and love from so many friends and family. It is now time for me to pay it forward with hopes of supporting others who are faced with the same challenge I was in — to find thirty thousand friends.

Team Haupt is now forming a new non-profit organization named 30K Friends Foundation. We are dedicated to providing support to leukemia and other blood cancer patients in need of a matching donor for a life-saving bone marrow transplant. Our mission is to increase awareness about the importance of registering to become a potential bone marrow donor, to grow the number of registered bone marrow donors, and to educate the public about the critical role of bone marrow stem cell transplants in saving the lives of patients with no other option for a cure.

The chance of finding a matching bone marrow donor is 1 in 30,000, creating an urgent need to connect each patient with 30,000 potential miracle matches. If a match is not found in the existing bone marrow registries – as was the case for me when I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia in 2009 – the patient and his or her family is left to search the world for a matching donor and navigate the complicated process largely on their own.

30K Friends Foundation is committed to helping patients and their families find that miracle bone marrow match and be their guide through this process – connecting them with 30,000 life-saving friends to find a cure.

Check back soon as we gear up for the launch of 30K Friends Foundation in December 2010.

The Roller Coaster Chronicles: An open letter to cancer doctors everywhere

Dear Doctor,

Here we are, you and me, our lives connected by cancer. My cancer. Under the circumstances, I’m really glad to have you in my life, and I want our relationship to be very, very long and very, very good, but since I can’t find a manual on how to build our relationship, I’m guessing that, like any good one, it has to start with trust.

But trust takes time, which we don’t have, so I have some things to ask and say.

First, just what am I trusting in you? That you’re brilliant, cool under pressure, experienced, knowledgable and up-to-date on the latest miracles of modern science for my type of cancer? That you won’t be too proud to call in colleagues or send me to them if you get stumped or run out of ideas? That you’ll always be honest with me no matter how hard it is for you or me? That you’ll help me set realistic expectations without ever stealing my hope? That you’ll be my strength if I’m too weak to be strong? That you won’t give up on me if the going gets rough and it looks like I won’t be one of your success stories?

Do you understand that it’s hard enough to put my trust in you, but even harder to put blind faith in the people I can’t see but on whom you rely? Like the pathologists who look at tiny pieces of me or the radiologists who interpret pictures of my innards. You may know their credentials, but I don’t.

I get that you went to medical school to learn how to identify and treat disease, not to listen to me blather on about how cancer is more than a physical problem. That it’s really personal. That it sweeps us patients and our families into a tempest of confusion, fear, frustration, vulnerability and isolation from the healthy world. I’ll try very hard to check those emotions at the door when you and I visit, but if they creep into the examining room, is it too much to ask you to recognize that I’m not just a collection of cells that needs to be fixed while you work to fix my wayward cells?

And Doc, surely you know that your sophisticated equipment can’t see the parts of me that make me who I am. And I am not my cancer. No machine can identify the parts that make me love and laugh. And none can calculate how very afraid I am. Of what lies ahead. Of dying. Of pain. Of medical procedures. And of becoming a number in a bureaucracy where no one will care whether I end up running a marathon or being turned over in a bed like a piece of meat on a rotisserie. Could you occasionally share my fear and shore up my hope?

Doc, I’ve tried to put myself in your shoes, but I can’t imagine how, day in and day out, you see humanity at its weakest and still find the strength to help us. I’m just glad that you can. And I know I need much more from you than you need from me, but I’ll do anything to help you help me, if only you can squeeze out a little time to teach me how to be a good cancer patient in addition to everything else that I ask of you.

Neither you nor I can predict the future, Doc, and I don’t expect you to do more than is humanly possible. But may I trust you to treat my future as if it were your very own?

Respectfully,
Your Patient

Betsy de Parry is the author of The Roller Coaster Chronicles and host of a series of webcasts about cancer.