Zhang Yu, Zhang Chaoyi

JeniZhang13@163.com

“NO one’s life is always perfect. Look ahead no matter what. Stay hopeful and you will be invincible. Cheer up!” Such encouragement was written on a card on which a Communist Party of China badge was pinned.

The card was sent by a military veteran in Shenzhen surnamed Deng, who donated hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) at Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital yesterday, China’s Army Day, to save a patient with blood disease.

The donated HSCs would be transplanted into the recipient’s body on the same day, according to Shenzhen Blood Center.

Deng became the city’s 630th and the country’s 15,733rd volunteer donor to have donated HSCs to an unrelated recipient, and the city’s 49th HSC donor this year.

Deng, who was born after 1980, donated blood for the first time in 2013, hoping to help others. He has since become a frequent blood donor, and won the gold medal of the 2020-2021 National Blood Donation Contribution Award.

During a blood donation in 2015, Deng joined the China Marrow Donor Program (CMDP). In 2020, he received a call telling him that there was a successful match. However, the donation fell through due to the recipient’s personal reasons.

Three years later, another call of a successful match came. This time, everything went smoothly. “I prepared this card because I thought that since I was going to help, and the recipient was ill and had been through a very painful time, I would simply say a few words to cheer him/her up,” Deng said in an interview.

“There is also a Party badge that has been with me for many years. I want to give it to the recipient, hoping that he/she will see the badge as if seeing the sun,” he added.

As a military veteran, Deng also believed that it was meaningful for him to donate HSCs on Army Day.

According to Lan Yuxiao, head of Shenzhen Blood Center’s social affairs department, the chance of a successful match is very low. “Generally speaking, a recipient is very lucky if he/she can find a matching donor out of 10,000 people.”

Lan called for more people to join the CMDP to increase the chance of successful matches. To join the CMDP, citizens can leave a blood sample and register when donating blood.

Shenzhen has the largest number of HSC donors on the Chinese mainland, data from the center showed. As of June, the CMDP recorded 63,549 registered HSC donors from the city.

The city took the lead in establishing an HSC donor database Aug. 1, 2000, and was the first to propose the idea of recruiting voluntary HSC donors among blood donors, according to the center.