As we reflect during the High Holy Days on issues of life and death, Rabbi Yoshi shares an interview with Lauren Ullmann, a Stanford Business School student and former MIT varsity goaltender player whose life was saved by a donation of peripheral stem cells. Fans of the Search for Meaning podcast will know who made that donation.
Determined to use her experience as a team leader and the lessons taught from seeing the whole field as a collegiate goaltender to excel in business, Ullmann interned for the prestigious Bain & Company, eventually becoming a senior associate consultant.
Late in 2019, she headed to the San Francisco Bay Area -- where he grandparents lived -- for an externship. The night before running a marathon in early January of 2020, she experienced "horrible, horrible" stomach pain. Though she was able to run the race, it returned several days later. After a miserable week and several blood tests at UCSF, Ullman thought it was the flu or appendicitis. While visiting her grandparents with her mother in town, she was rushed to the Stanford ER at 4:30 a.m. After 11 hours, she was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia.
She began treatment immediately and soon was able to travel back to New York to Memorial Sloan Kettering. She needed a bone marrow stem cell transplant, and neither of her siblings were good enough matches. She turned to the Be The Match Registry. With only three potential matches and the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding, she miraculously found not only a donor, but a new family.