Due to privacy reasons, the real names of the individuals mentioned below are not revealed.

Cancer
Case 1
At the age of 6 months, Julia’s health was going downhill fast with advanced leukaemia that had ravaged her little body in less than a month. Doctors had given her less than a 10% chance of survival.

Her mother, who was pregnant at that point, said she thought of aborting her second child for fear that she would not be able to go the full term with her first daughter’s health hanging in the balance.

One gynaecologist told her about a new procedure that could save her daughter’s life. This involved the transplant of her to-be-newly-born baby’s cord blood stem cells into Julia. This procedure required the to-be-newly born baby’s stem cells to be a match for Julia and also relied on whether Julia lived long enough for the procedure to be carried out.

Thankfully, Julia made it to her first birthday on April 6 and then to April 21 when her baby brother was born. There was more good news: The stem cells, extracted and stored by a private cord blood bank, StemLife, were an exact match. The parents were elated. The transplant went ahead without a hitch at the Kuala Lumpur Hospital.

Julia regained her health in months to become the bouncy baby that her parents had prayed for.
(adapted from New Straits Times, 18th March 2006)

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