Suburban Family Pleads for Bone Marrow Donations for Toddler Son

While the ideal candidates for a bone marrow transplant are siblings, 22-month-old Sawyer is an only child and must find a match in the National Marrow Donor pool.

The family of a Schaumburg toddler fighting a rare disease is pleading with the public to consider donating bone marrow to their son, who is in need of a transplant.

Sawyer Wright was diagnosed with aplastic anemia in February when he was just 18 months old. It's a condition where the immune system attacks the body's bone marrow, which creates white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets.

"It is rare in kids," said Dr. A Kyle Mack, a pediatric hematology physician at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital. "We don't always know what the causes are."

Sawyer, now 22 months old, has been in and out of the hospital since early February. He was admitted full-time at Lurie Children's at the end of April, his parents said.

"We just feel kind of helpless," said Tiffany Wright. "We want to take all the pain away from him, try to help him. You want to hold your kid so close to you and protect them from everything, and this is one thing we couldn't protect him from."

Kevin Wright said he lost his engineering job at a local company on the day of Sawyer's diagnosis.

"He is a fighter and we just go day by day," Kevin Wright said.

Doctors said the ideal candidates for a bone marrow transplant are siblings. Sawyer is an only child and must find a match in the National Marrow Donor pool.

"We want people just to donate, even if it's not for our son, just be a donor for someone else," said Tiffany Wright.

To find out more information on how to become a donor, visit bethematch.org.

The Wright family has also set up a GoFundMe page to help with medical costs.

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