Yucca Valley resident and San Bernardino County Fire Battalion Chief Steve Lasiter signed up to be a bone marrow donor about five years ago, during a bone marrow sign-up drive for Mark Gary, owner of Gary’s Tires in Joshua Tree. While he wasn’t a match for Gary, Lasiter was called a couple years later because he was a match for another man. Last Saturday, Lasiter met the West Virginia man whose life he saved.
Managing editor Tami Roleff says it was an emotional meeting for the two men…
“It’s rewarding to see something that you’re able to do have a great end result. And I mean, a lot of time with my job I see people and what I’m helping stuff, and I don’t oftentimes get to see the outcome of that. We send them to the hospital or do whatever we do and then we never see them again. This particular case it was something we absolutely got an opportunity to see it all the way through, which was great.” County Fire Captain Steve Lasiter donated bone marrow about 3 ½ years ago to Randy Pence, a man he’d never met who had a form of leukemia.
The two men had been exchanging emails for a couple years but had never met until a reunion for adult bone marrow donors and recipients at Duke University in North Carolina on September 12. Lasiter and Pence were the guests of honor at the event. In an interview with WNCN-TV, Pence, a father of three from West Virginia, said meeting Lasiter was pretty amazing. “To finally meet the gentleman that took his time out of his life to donate to me so I could live and be with my family, it’s emotional.” Lasiter said that while the bone marrow donation isn’t as painful as it once was—when they drilled a hole into your bones to withdraw the marrow—it’s still an ordeal. For about two weeks, he had to take a drug to boost the production of his red blood cells, and he said he was very sick during the entire two weeks, plus an additional two weeks afterward. But it was worth it, he said. Lasiter said he and Pence have a special bond. “Yeah, we laugh now. We are truly blood brothers. He used to have A+ blood and now he’s O-, which is my blood type.” To learn more about becoming a bone marrow donor, visit www.bethematch.org.
