Jake Sachse Launches Marrow Drive for Dad

Saturday Event Seeks Participants for Bone Marrow Registry

In the 1950’s TV drama ‘The Millionaire,’ a regular everyday person was given $1 million tax-free by the wealthy (but never seen) John Beresford Tipton, through his representative Michael Anthony. Although Palisades Palisades resident Ed Sachse didn’t come into $1 million, he did receive five million stem cells from an anonymous donor, which saved his life. In 2002, Sachse, who at 41 had a successful real estate business, a wife and two kids, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma’a disease that had killed his father at 45. He began a three-year odyssey of chemotherapy and his own stem-cell transplantation, with little success. Weak and living on blood transfusions, Sachse learned that his only hope would be another stem-cell transplantation. Working with the City of Hope and the National Marrow Donor Program, Sachse found an exact genetic match living on the other side of the country in 2004. After another two years, Ed finally realized that he wasn’t getting better and decided to go ahead with the second transplantation. This Saturday, November 17 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Sachse’s son Jake, a junior at Crossroads School, and a group of 40 high school students are holding a bone-marrow drive in the community room at Crossroads (corner of 18th and Olympic.) They hope to add hundreds of people (ages 18-60) to the Bone Marrow National Registry in a 10-minute procedure, which entails a mouth swab sample and a short questionnaire. In a speech last April at the PhaseOneFoundation event, which funds clinical trials and underwrites cancer research, Sachse recalled his journey with special attention to his donor, his angel. ‘This complete stranger gave me the most incredible gift of life,’ he said. ‘Hope.’ It was this speech that inspired Jake to launch the ‘Be an Angel + Save a Life’ Bone Marrow Drive with the help of high school students from Crossroads, as well as Wildwood, Brentwood, Beverly, Archer and Windward to register potential stem-cell donors in the National Marrow Donor Program. ‘I basically felt lucky enough to have a father, ‘ Jake told the Palisadian-Post. ‘This drive started as a community service project just to get my hours for school. I got a few friends to help, but when people heard about it they wanted to contribute. ‘ Not only is Jake hoping to add 500 potential stem-cell donors to the registry, but he and his friends have also raised $ 40,000 so far from corporate sponsors like Pharmaca and Robeks, as well as real estate companies and the entertainment industry. Individuals who would like to contribute may also make a donation by going to www.BeAnAngelSaveALife.org. The money helps to cover the $50 per person cost of adding donors to the national registry. Before Sachse’s second transplantation a few years ago, his daughter Erin contributed her own efforts to his recovery by raising $24,000 in a couple of months for her bat mitzvah, which she contributed to the City of Hope. ‘She walked into Dr. Steve Forman’s office (my oncologist) with an envelope stuffed with checks, cash and coins and gave it to him,’ Sachse recalled. For Sachse, now 46, Saturday will be especially poignant, as he will meet for the first time his personal angel, Sandra Samaniego, a 38-year-old woman from Alexandria, Virginia. Samaniego underwent a blood stem-cell procedure, wherein the blood-forming cells are separated from the blood through a needle in one arm, with the remaining blood returned to the donor through the other arm. Her donation yielded five million cells in a four-hour period. After a mutually agreed upon year waiting period, the Sachses got in touch with the donor. ‘When we talked to her, my husband was thanking her, but she was thanking us,’ Julie Sachse, Ed’s wife, told the Palisadian-Post.’ ‘She told us this was the most incredible thing in her life!’ Ed says he’s a lucky man, with many angels in his life’his donor, doctor and family, who in turn have been similarly touched. ‘When I started this, I didn’t know what a stem cell drive was,’ Jake said. ‘I hadn’t researched it, but through this process, I learned what my dad went through. It turned into this huge organization that might lead to another drive. Everybody wants to be able to be an angel to help save a life.’