Jehvan Crompton loves science, English and video games. Right now he’s a fourteen year-old who’s [SL1] focused on beating cancer. He urgently needs a bone marrow donor.
He has chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), a type of cancer that starts in blood-forming cells of the bone marrow. His diagnosis came as a surprise. As he was being prepped to have a tendon in his foot repaired in July 2019, routine pre-surgery bloodwork showed he had CML.
Jehvan started chemotherapy right away, but within a year, it stopped working. Another chemo stopped working after eight months. Now he’s on a third-generation chemotherapy, along with the daily pills which have side effects, like a body rash and fluid buildup. His mother Kimberly Crompton worries this drug may stop working, too.
“It’s a chronic cancer and can mutate to become a more serious or life threatening,” she says. “The goal of the chemotherapy was to slow it down and possibly bring it into remission, but Jehvan is now starting to go into reverse and accelerate.”
Looking for a match
Jehvan’s best shot at curing his cancer is getting a bone marrow transplant. The search for a donor started with his three siblings. One of his brothers is a half match, but doctors are hoping they can find a full match.
Now as a high school freshman Jehvan’s working with Be the Match, a nonprofit that matches patients with bone marrow donors. But finding a match is more challenging than expected. Because tissue typing is inherited from a person’s ancestry and patients are most likely to find a match from someone in their same ethnic background.
Since Jevhan is Black, his ideal match will be a Black donor. And considering only 4% of people on the Be the Match registry also identify as Black, Jehvan’s likelihood of finding a match is only 23%.
“As I began to educate myself about the lack of the black population on the registry, it was something to really work towards,” says Crompton. “Now we’re starting to see these numbers really increase.”
Registration is as easy as swabbing your cheek and sending the swab to Be the Match.
If you could offer hope to someone dying from cancer, would you?
In January 2021, the family, who live two hours North of LA in Bakersfield, made it their mission to recruit donors. While their initial goal was to sign up for 200 people. They’ve registered over 11,000 so far.
“It’s a surreal feeling knowing that others are out there willing to help,” she says.
Before her son was sick, Crompton didn’t know about bone marrow transplants since they didn’t apply to her. She says the Black community doesn’t generally trust the process because they don’t know the truth about bone marrow transplants. Now she wants to educate them about why it’s important and how they can help.
“I think that if we’re educated enough and know the process and what the common goal is, eventually we will start to see those numbers increase in the Black community,” she says.
Hope
Jehvan and his mother are focused on registering more people, especially diverse donors.
“I want to help other people that are like me,” says Jehvan, who loves video editing and hopes to become a video game designer.
His mother is confident he’s going to find a donor: “I know Jevhan is going to find the perfect match, real soon.”
Looking ahead, she says, “I’m ready for him to be cured of this so he can live that life that he should have, without taking medication every day, without depending on chemotherapy, just to be able to move around, and function in his full capacity.”