Bone marrow donation results in 'gift of more moments and more memories'

Islander gives Gift of Life

Part one

Story and Photo by Alice Gerard

Senior Contributing Writer

Late in November of 2022, Islander Kim Kalman traveled to Washington, D.C., to donate her bone marrow to someone she had never met. The actual donation occurred on Nov. 23, the day before Thanksgiving. After having been on Be The Match’s donor list since 2009, she got the call that she was a match with a 62-year-old man who was “suffering from Myelodysplastic syndrome, which is a group of cancers in which immature blood cells in the bone marrow don’t mature and become healthy blood,” Kalman explained.

Be the Match is now known as the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP).

After the donation, Kalman and her recipient were permitted to communicate with each other anonymously. The NMDP rule was that a full year had to pass before the donor and the recipient could meet.

A year of Kalman and her recipient exchanging anonymous letters and cards passed, and Thanksgiving 2023 had arrived. Kalman said she wanted to meet her recipient. She worked with her coordinator to have her contact information sent to her recipient’s coordinator.

Two months earlier, she had received, via NMDP, a letter from her recipient’s wife, saying, “The timeline of life in his instance was truly defined by your choice to donate. Because of your blessing, we were given the gift of more moments and more memories. Because of your blessing, we were given the opportunity to change our perspective (and) to alter our priorities. To simply say thank you just isn’t enough. He is my everything. As many people do, we’ve had trials and tribulations, joys and successes and, with that, I would do it all over again.”

“So, I literally went (to my coordinator) and said, here’s my information,” Kalman said. “I know it’s a holiday weekend. Take it and do what you want with it. God, please tell me where he is.”

Kalman said she wanted to meet her recipient, but she had concerns. “We did have letters back and forth, but that doesn’t mean you actually want face to face communication with one another.

“Stu’s story is that he had his coordinator reach out to him and say check your email because there’s an early Christmas present in your email. It was my contact information. I didn’t know that until Stu actually contacted me, which was super cool.

“I started crying. This is not happening. I didn’t even know that he would even want that communication.”

“Oh, we did. Yeah,” said Stu Fugate, the recipient of Kalman’s bone marrow donation. “One hundred percent.”

“It’s been a blessing. It has. You’re family now,” said Fugate, a resident of Beulah, Kentucky, to Kalman during a visit that he and members of his family made to Grand Island in June. Fugate, who had been diagnosed with leukemia in 2021, said he had no doubt about wanting to meet his donor.

His cancer is now in remission.

“From day one, I wanted to meet Kim. I think, who are they? Where are they from? My only thing was I hope there’s an East Kentucky connection,” Fugate said.

“And there is,” Kalman said. “My mom’s parents were born in two different cities in Kentucky.”

“One is about 45 minutes from my home,” Fugate explained. “The other is about an hour and 15 minutes from my home. Wayland is pretty close, about 45 minutes. Wayland is in Floyd County, and Louisa is in Johnson County. That’s pretty neat. That was my only thing. I thought, I hope, somehow, we’ve got an East Kentucky connection.”

Kentucky is the place where Fugate grew up and where generations of Fugates grew up.

“I’ve lived in Eastern Kentucky all my life. It’s a beautiful area. Not so much in the winter, but lots of places aren’t,” he said. “But it’s a gorgeous area. Most of the industry in the area is coal mining. Most counties in Eastern Kentucky are diversifying. There’s some manufacturing. Tourism is the big growth item now. It’s progressing, slowly but surely.”

Fugate has deep roots in Eastern Kentucky. His family has lived there “for a couple hundred years, maybe 150 years. My family came from Moccasin Creek, Virginia. They were traveling to Missouri. Winter hit, and the lady was pregnant, so they decided to stay in that area until the weather broke in the spring. Two brothers actually stayed there. One brother went on to Missouri. So, that’s how we got to Eastern Kentucky. The Fugate name is a pretty common name.

“My grandfather raised me. His name was Simpson Fugate, and my great grandparents. I had divorced parents. I went through school and graduated from high school, worked in the coal mines, worked in surface mines, worked in manufacturing. My recent 12 years has been with a community college. I’m working with quality control projects. Construction projects. I work in Hazard on Monday and Friday, and I work in Elizabethtown Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I have one son from a previous marriage: Stuart. He’s in Nebraska. Mindy is my second wife. Between us, we’ve got Keith, who’s in California. We’ve got Justin, whom you just met, who’s here with the baby. We’ve got Stuart, who’s the oldest, and he’s in Nebraska.”

In 2021, Fugate noticed his energy level was lagging and that tasks that had never been hard for him felt exhausting.

“I had been short of breath,” he said. “I walked up the stairs a little bit and lay down. I’d get short of breath when I was sitting and watching TV. In September of 2021, we went to my niece’s in Florida. I went to cut the grass. That should have been a 20-minute job. It took me about an hour to cut the grass. I would just break out, wringing wet with water. Sweat. Shortness of breath. That just wasn’t like me. I was always go go go go. And so, when I got back, I was stacking some brush. Again, just totally out of breath. I’m not going to be able to get back to the river house to get this job done. So, I thought, I’m going to do something here and get checked out. This isn’t normal. It was the first week of October.”

Fugate went to see his doctor to find out the cause of his health problems. The doctor ordered tests and a scan.

“They went in and checked the arteries and what have you,” he said. “They were all good. He came back in and said, ‘Everything’s good. There are no blockages or anything like that. But your blood work is not hardly great.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I’m going to send you to a hematologist, let them do some further checking because I just don’t know at this point.’ So, he sent me to a hematologist, and it came back as leukemia. And, at that point, it was forwarded to UK (University of Kentucky). We didn’t hear anything back for a couple of weeks.

“I have a great friend, and we talked every day. I stopped by his office, and he said, ‘You’re going to tell me what’s going on with you. We’re too good of friends. I just want to know.’ I said, ‘I’m pretty private.’ And I said, 'I’ve got cancer.’ And I told him what kind. He got a sticky pad and wrote MD Anderson. On the sticky pad, he wrote, ‘This is where you’re going.’ And so, I said, ‘I don’t know about all that.’ He said, ‘This is where you’re going.’ ”

MD Anderson is a cancer hospital in Houston, Texas.

“It’s rated one of the best in the world in the treatment of leukemia,” Fugate said. “So, I said, ‘Let me check into it. Let’s just call there and see.’”

A few days later, Fugate was in Houston. He said his oncologist was “Dr. Amin Alousi. Fabulous. He and his staff in their department are just the best. Not a negative word at all. Everything was just terrific. So, with that, they give us a diagnosis. They told us where they think we should go. This is the treatment. They worked with UK on the treatment. I got the chemo at UK, but MD Anderson guided the ship of when we did it, how often we did it. I was going to Houston every two months for checkups. I had the transplant on Nov. 24, 2022.”

“My surgery was in Washington, D.C.,” Kalman said.

“Mine was in Houston,” Fugate said.

“I didn’t know where he was when I did my surgery,” Kalman said.

Next time: The bone marrow transplant, Fugate’s recovery, Kalman’s surprise visit to Kentucky and more.