Bone Marrow Donor Invites 3-Year-Old Transplant Recipient To Be Flower Girl In Wedding
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HARTFORD, Ala. (KDKA) -- A woman who donated her bone marrow to a young girl in need of a transplant later invited her to be a flower girl in her wedding.
The Dothan Eagle reports Hayden Hatfield signed up with Be The Match, a national registry of volunteer bone marrow donors, when she was in college and received a call almost a year later saying she was a match for a baby girl in California.
The little girl, named Skye Savren-McCormick, had developed several illnesses before her first birthday, including a rare childhood leukemia that required a bone marrow transplant.
Hatfield underwent the bone marrow extraction procedure and Skye had the transplant, which, along with a second transplant from a different donor, helped put her on the road to recovery.
Be The Match policies prevented Hatfield and the Savren-McCormick family from contacting one another for a year, but Hatfield sent an anonymous letter through the organization, telling the Savren-McCormicks how the experience had changed her life.
Hatfield and Skye's parents later got in touch through email, phone calls and Facebook.
For Skye's 3rd birthday, Hatfield sent Skye a present along with an invitation for Skye to be a flower girl in her wedding.
A few weeks before the June 7 event, Skye's doctors cleared her to make the trip to Alabama for the wedding.
"After everything, after this journey, it's like God showed me this is why you were here. You were here to help this little girl and everything else will fall into place," Hatfield told the Dothan Eagle.