My name is Kalyani Mehta. My family is of Asian descent. My 13 year old daughter Devaanshi was diagnosed with aplastic anaemia in October 2006 and was fortunate to receive a bone marrow transplant in April 2007 and a 2nd transplant in February 2008.
Unfortunately, Devaanshi is currently platelet transfusion dependant
Devaanshi was lucky enough to have a matched sibling donor who was my son; his name is Dushyant and he is five years old now and has donated his marrow to her twice.
Devaanshi is still under care at Great Ormond Street Hospital.
I have been looking into the fact that there does not seem to be enough donors for bone marrow, blood, platelets or organs within our Asian community and I would like to try and raise awareness and get a campaign going with mass impact for people to be able to see Devaanshi and more importantly Dushyant as he has donated and maybe it will appeal to people more if they see that a five year old has donated twice and is still a normal healthy child.
Devaanshi needs a platelet transfusion every 8 days.We are experiencing some difficulties in obtaining platelets for Devaanshi as she is a negative blood group and needs very specific platelets and from what I understand from the hospital’s the donors are simply not there.
Recently we were told that Devaanshi would have to wait for platelets as there were none in the country. This terrifying news meant that Devaanshi could potentially have bled and matters could have very quickly become dangerous for her.
Luckily Great Ormond Street were able to obtain matched platelets but as you can imagine it was a very tense time for us.
CLICK HERE to read Devaanshi's blog
Please CLICK HERE to read about the 2 donation procedures
Thank You
Kalyani Mehta
