Sophomore honors his grandmother by donating stem cells to a stranger battling leukemia
By Billy Liggett
Jesse Lockamy was 11 when his grandmother died from leukemia in 2006. The two were very close — she lived just down the road
from Jesse’s home in Willow Springs and made time for lunch every Sunday with her grandson.
In the final years of his grandmother’s life, many of those Sundays were spent in the hospital. Her leukemia diagnosis came just three years after a lengthy and successful battle with breast cancer. The second fight lasted just a few months.
“Cancer is a terrible thing,” says Jesse, today a sophomore at Campbell University. “As a kid, I couldn’t fathom the idea of my grandmother passing away and never seeing her again. But I remember a lot from the experience — the doctors were not only there for her, they were there for me and my family. They talked us through everything, and I was always grateful for that. I decided back then that I wanted to be able to do something like that for someone else one day. I wanted to give back.”
His first step came after high school when he enrolled at Campbell and chose pre-professional biology as a major. His immediate goal after graduation in 2017 is acceptance into Campbell’s School of Osteopathic Medicine — a career choice born from his experience with the physicians who cared for his grandmother.
The “giving back” continued last spring when Jesse signed up to become a bone marrow or a peripheral blood stem cell donor. Bone marrow or cord blood transplants are considered the best treatment option (or the only potential cure) for people with leukemia, lymphoma and several other diseases. He knew going in his chances of actually donating were low — only 8 percent of those who are called back for being a potential match are actually called on to donate.
“It was a co-worker who signed me up,” Jesse says, “and he had been on the registry for 15 years. He told me I would probably never get a call, but it was good to sign up and at least be on the list.”
Jesse got a call three months later.
Not long after, he was chosen as the donor for an anonymous leukemia patient a few states away. With final exams approaching that spring, Jesse began the preparation process to be a donor — a process that requires many tests, several shots and a slough of side effects, including flu-like symptoms. Those symptoms coincided with his final exams that spring. He managed mostly A’s despite the fever, sweats and nausea.
“It was tough, but the whole time I remembered my grandmother and the pain she went through,” Jesse says. “Enduring [the flu], getting a few shots and sitting there for a couple of hours [during the donation] is no comparison to the pain she went through.”
As Jesse learned after being chosen, there are two methods of donation — peripheral blood stem cells and bone marrow. A bone marrow donation is a more invasive surgery where doctors extract liquid marrow from a pelvic bone. Jesse’s non-surgical PBSC donation required him to take injections of filgrastim (which increases the number of blood-forming cells in the blood stream) for five days before the donation. On donation day, the blood is removed through a needle in one arm, passed through a machine that separates the blood-forming cells, and is returned through a needle in the other arm.
In all, doctors circulated 26 liters of his blood, the equivalent of three complete blood transfusions.
“It wasn’t as bad as you’d think it would be,” he recalls. “I slept through most of it … you’re heavily medicated at the time.”
Because of patient privacy laws, Jesse doesn’t know the recipient of his donation and won’t unless the recipient decides to reach out to him a year after the procedure. While he would like to meet the person one day, he says it’s not something he’ll think a lot about unless it happens. Regardless, he’s happy he was chosen, and the experience has been a positive one for both him and his family.
“It’s one of the best experiences I’ve ever had,” he says. “Knowing that I potentially saved someone’s life and was able to give to someone something that wasn’t available to my grandmother — it’s a really good feeling.”
It’s not only strengthened his desire to become a doctor, it’s also motivated him to get the word out about bone marrow and stem cell donation. Jesse says he is looking into speaking for student groups at Campbell about his experience and the importance of signing up to be a donor. He’s also hoping to orchestrate drives through campus medical and health science clubs in the coming semesters.
“So few of the people who need these transfusions are getting them,” he says. “And not many people know about donating. In Europe, the blood drives are much more common. In Germany, everyone is on the registry. I want that involvement over here.”
Jesse’s mother, Pam Lockamy, says she is proud of her son’s unselfishness more than anything.
“I remember when he first found out he was going to donate, it was spring break and he was leaving for a trip to the beach with his friends and their families,” she says. “I gave him the ‘Don’t do anything wrong while you are away’ talk, and he told me that I did not have anything to worry about. He said he definitely would not do anything to jeopardize [the patient’s] chance at receiving a transplant. I was so touched by that statement, because I had not thought of it that way.”