Westford Academy Grad Saves A Life With Senior Project

About two thirds of 2012 Westford Academy’s graduating class participated in a senior internship program last year, but few, if any can claim the impact that Thomas Kolek had.

Now a student at Northeastern, Kolek’s work with the Be The Match registry helped save the life of a two-year-old boy.

Hoping to build on the work from another graduate the previous year, Kolek hosted a drive for the registry, the world’s largest hematopoietic donor registry, helping patients with blood, bone marrow and immune system disorders.

While he aimed to bring awareness to the program and help better the staggering odds in finding a match, Kolek went beyond signing people up and decided to participate himself, taking a cheek swab to put into the registry so he could donate for anyone found to be a match for him.

While some more common types of tissue can find a donor quickly, according to the Be The Match website, the odds for finding a match for some more uncommon bone marrow or blood stem cell types can be as high as 10.5 million to one.

Despite the odds, Kolek recently learned that his contribution did find a match in one young boy with a type of hemaglobinopathy, a disorder affecting the ability of hemoglobin in blood to bind with oxygen.

“Tommy called and told us that he had been identified as a possible match,” said his mother Ann, an acute care nurse. “You could hear the excitement in his voice that he was going to be able to help someone this way.”

Although Kolek never met the match due to confidentiality laws, on Oct. 3, 2013, he donated two thirds of a liter of bone marrow in a process that took 40 minutes, spending approximately 10 additional hours to prepare and recover from the procedure.

“I woke up with next to no pain, albeit I had a decent amount of local anesthetic around the procedure site,” he said. “However, even after spending a couple of days recovering in my dorm, the most pain I ever felt was some general stiffness and a little soreness when I bent over to grab something. That’s very little to go through compare to what the recipient must have gone through that led them to need someone else’s marrow.”

More information on Be The Match is available on their website.