Boning Up On Saving Lives

Every day, cancer patients die waiting to find a bone marrow match. That’s why Roy Yonashiro of the Hawaii Bone Marrow Donor Registry wants to sign up more donors. ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ he says, ‘to save a life’

Wednesday - March 09, 2005
By Alice Keesing
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The pair did meet face-to-face just over a year later when Jonathan and his family flew to Hawaii to meet the Martinsons. Another special moment came last summer when Martinson traveled to Riverside, Calif., to see Jonathan graduate.

“His mother was just in tears because she thought that day would never come,” Martinson remembers.

Yonashiro wants there to be more days like that. “My wish is that our donor base becomes so huge that when a patient is diagnosed and comes into the registry, we’ve got a donor just like that,” he says.

The way it is now, many die waiting.

“And we’re seeing a lot more patients coming up,” Yonashiro says. “Just recently we seem to have a lot of children.”

He and his co-workers have an amazing dedication to their work. Last year, they were honored with the National Marrow Donor Program’s Allison Atlas Award. The prestigious award was for the registry’s ambassador program, which uses donors to help raise awareness about the need for new donors.

Hawaii’s diverse population can help increase the pool of donors so that patients of all ethnic backgrounds have a chance of finding a donor. In Hawaii, the biggest need is for donors of Asian and Pacific Islander ancestry.

It’s an unusual fact that matches are found within the patient’s family only 30 percent of the time. Your perfect match might be someone who lives on another island, or on the Mainland, or even halfway around the world. That fact is graphically illustrated by a world map that hangs in the registry office at the St. Francis Medical Center — it shows that bone marrow donors in Hawaii have saved lives from Sweden to New Zealand to the Czech Republic to Argentina.

One of the hardest things for patients and the registry team is when someone on the registry turns up as a match but won’t go through with the procedure.

“It’s sad, but it happens,” Yonashiro says. “But this is a volunteer donor program. We don’t want people to feel pressured to do this. I want people to do it because it’s the right thing for them.”

Yonashiro’s own dedication to the cause came in a roundabout way. After graduating from Kaimuki High School in 1972, he became the lead vocalist for the well-known ’70s band Natural High. The variety show dance group traveled widely around the Mainland with its skits and impersonations a la the Society of Seven. In 1982, Yonashiro entered the travel industry, working in reservations and passenger service at American Airlines.

Then, in 1990, his wife Annie’s friend was diagnosed with leukemia. Her only chance of survival was a bone marrow transplant, and Yonashiro and Annie threw themselves into the donor drives. Doctors attempted a transplant with her son’s bone marrow — it wasn’t a perfect match but it was the only option she had.

“She didn’t make it,” Yonashiro says. “That funeral was really hard. It was hard to see her husband going up to her casket with their two kids. I looked at my wife and I said, ‘We can’t let this happen again. We’ve got to sign up more donors. People shouldn’t die because we can’t find donors, because they are out there.’”

Volunteering with donor drives became a regular part of the Yonashiros’ lives. And when the registry hired on a donor recruitment coordinator in 1994, he was a natural fit for the job.

“Since then I’ve gone to more funerals than I care to go to,” Yonashiro says. “It’s very heartbreaking but I just keep trying. It’s worse if I say I can’t keep doing this.”

If you’re interested in joining the bone marrow donor registry, you can get more information at www.stfrancishawaii.org/hawaiibonemarrow or call 547-6154.

If you already have signed up, you can go to the same website to update your contact information.

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