SAN DIEGO — 14-year-old Chase Riehl is looking to beat leukemia for the second time after a year-long remission, and now, doctors are searching for a matching bone marrow donor to help him beat leukemia for good.
“Um, despair, fear, um,” said Sunshine Riehl, recalling the raw emotions she felt when first learning her son was diagnosed with leukemia last year. “His teachers adore him, his friends adore him, he’s just a special kid, and we never want this to happen to anybody, but it felt unfair.”
Most kids go into remission after their first month of aggressive chemotherapy. For Chase, it took five months of treatment at Rady Children’s Hospital.
“He was truly suffering and I was struggling with ‘how much do we put him through?’ I started to feel inhumane to some extent just because of how sick he was all the time,” recalled Riehl.
Chase pulled through and his leukemia went into remission. He then had a bone marrow transplant, and the best match they could find at the time was his mother.
“It is such an amazing feeling to be able to be a part of, such an integral part of saving your child’s life, but if it fails, you also feel the weight of that too, you feel pretty helpless,” said Riehl.
Chase was leukemia-free for a full year, but a few weeks ago, his family noticed something wasn’t right.
“This time he was having some abnormal bruising, fatigue, and then his nausea, which he had the first time, his nausea had gotten worse,” said Riehl. “It was terrifying. He had already been through so much.”
Testing confirmed the leukemia was back and when she told Chase the news, he once again showed how strong a boy he is.
“He goes, ‘I got this, I’ve been through it, I can do it again.’”
Now the search is on for another bone marrow donor to give Chase the best chance at a cure.
“A bone marrow transplant allows you to get a new immune system with the intention that the new immune system would recognize the leukemia as foreign and also target the leukemia to help eliminate it from your body,” said Dr. Dennis Kuo, oncologist at Rady Children’s Hospital.
Since Chase is 75% white and 25% Filipino, the best match for him would be someone with a similar ethnicity profile, which isn’t easy to find. In fact, there is a shortage of minority and mixed-race donors on the registry.
“The odds of someone matching Chase is somewhat like winning the lottery, but people who do register, they could be helping other families in a similar situation as we are,” said Riehl.
To see if you could be a matching donor for someone in need, you can join the registry at Be the Match. To help Chase, you can text TEAMCHASE to 61474 or scan the QR code on the flyer.
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