Hempfield family fighting son's leukemia encourages people to join transplant registry

When Lucas James’ mom came to pick him up from school two years ago, Lucas knew something was terribly wrong.

“I had on-and-off fevers, and we ended up having to do a blood test,” said Lucas, 14. “I was at school when my mom had gotten notified.

“She was so sad, I thought something had happened. And it turned out that I had cancer.”

Lucas was diagnosed with leukemia in January 2022. Since then, he has been in and out of hospitals and treatment and has had to stop attending school in person at Hempfield Area School District.

After two years of treatments, doctors thought his cancer had gone into remission, but it returned only a few days after he finished his course of chemotherapy in January.

Since the relapse, Lucas’ mom and dad, Megan and Don James, with the help of the organization Be the Match, have been searching for a person who would have compatible blood-making bone marrow stem cells for a possible transplant.

“Since he relapsed, his bone marrow isn’t expected to be able to continue to produce regular cells. Even though they killed all the cancer, it came back,” Megan explained. “If they get his bone marrow to stop producing anything, with high chemotherapy and radiation, they will transplant other bone marrow stem cells into him, and it will teach his body to produce those stem cells instead.”

The prognosis for finding Lucas a match looks promising, Megan said, with two possible matches in process. But she wants to encourage people to get registered on the match registry, even if it won’t necessarily be for her son.

“They gave us no reason to think that they wouldn’t find a match, and there are some that are in process right now getting additional testing. But the thing that we want people to know is that that’s not the case for everybody,” she said. “We would encourage people to see if they are a match for someone.”

Cancer treatment

Dr. Randy Windreich, clinical director in the division of blood and marrow transplantation and cellular therapies at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, said Childrens’ program does anywhere from 40 to 45 stem cell transplants per year.

A match for a stem cell transplant is identified using HLA typing, which identifies the compatibility of unique sets of proteins, he said.

“We try to match those proteins as best we can to somebody else, and that allows the donor cells to graft and take root, and minimizes the risks of rejection and reduces some of the other potential risks of transplant,” Windreich said.

Once identified as a potential match, a candidate will undergo an evaluation to make sure they are healthy enough to be a donor, he said. They’ll also take a health history questionnaire.

“When it comes time for the actual donation, there’s a bone marrow harvest or a peripheral blood stem cell harvest, their stem cells will get collected at their donor site and Be the Match helps facilitate the shipping to the recipient center,” he said. “Then we will infuse the cells into the recipient.”

A match for Lucas or anyone else could come from another state or even outside the country. Finding a donor has become easier as technology and registries have advanced, and most people seeking a donor end up finding one.

“I think, as more and more donors have entered the registry as more registries have arisen, really throughout the world, I think we’ve really been able to find donors,” he said.

Windreich said the process to become registered is easier than people think. Instead of a blood draw, prospective donors swab their cheeks and send a kit back to Be the Match, which adds them to the registry.

“Kids like Lucas need help, and I think it makes our job easier when we have more donors to choose from,” he said. “It’s always difficult when we can’t find as well of a match donor as we would like — that makes our job a little bit harder — and that makes the kids or really any patient’s transplant course a bit harder.”

Keeping high spirits

In the meantime, while Be the Match and Children’s Hospital search for a match, Lucas is keeping busy with remote school.

He can’t play contact sports like he used to, but he still enjoys going outside and hanging out with his friends and family. He likes playing video games such as Fortnite with his friends and watching videos on YouTube.

Community members have pitched in to help the James family through Lucas’ treatment. A group of them are organizing a spaghetti dinner fundraiser for March 30 at the Greensburg Masonic Center from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m and 3:30 to 6 p.m. to raise money to support the family.

Hempfield Area School District sold fundraiser bracelets that read “Spartans for Lucas,” he said.

“In December of 2022, there was a Christmas light contest in our neighborhood in Fort Allen where they did ‘Lights for Lucas,’” Megan said. “Everybody that entered that ended up being a fundraiser for us.”

The process of looking for a match is an emotional one, Megan said, and the experience can be “terrifying.” That’s part of why she wants to encourage people to register.

“We know that we are depending on the kindness of someone else, and that’s why it’s so important to us that people be aware that it’s out there and that it’s very easy to be a part of the registry. Because you never know who it could be. It could be anybody,” she said. “You think it’s not going to happen to you until it does. We’re depending on the kindness of a stranger.”