3
Voice of Life
Kris Sorenson’s choice to obey a mysterious command meant everything to a dying wife and mother.
Kris Sorenson steered his Plymouth Colt into a parking space, grabbed his briefcase, and started the five-hundred-yard walk to his office at San Diego’s Balboa Naval Hospital. A budget analyst for the U.S. Navy, he liked to arrive early so he could hit the gym after work. The sun had risen just enough on that warm morning in July 1993 for him to see that the parking lots and walkways around him were deserted. It was 6:00 AM.
As he walked, Kris mentally ran through what he’d do first. There were phone calls to return and a report to file by 10:00. He passed the entrance to the medical center’s blood bank, where a sign tacked on the wall invited sign-ups for the National Marrow Donor Program registry. He’d donated blood or plasma a number of times over the years but had never given this program a real thought. Preoccupied as he was, he wouldn’t have on this morning either.
A few steps past the entryway, he stopped suddenly, startled by a man’s voice. It seemed to come from about thirty feet back, its tone emphatic:
“I want you to sign up for the bone marrow program.”
His first reaction was irritation. Who was telling him what to do? Whose business was it? He turned around to confront the over-assertive do-gooder.
No one was there.
He squinted and examined the entrance, the walkway, the parking lot. The doors were closed. There were no corners, garbage cans, mailboxes for someone to hide behind. Nothing.
Kris shrugged his shoulders. I must still be half asleep, he thought. One of those waking dreams. Need to get some coffee.
He turned and headed for the outside stairs that led to his office entrance.
This time the voice from behind was even more insistent: “I would like you to sign up for that bone marrow program!”
Kris whirled. Once again, no one was in sight.
Holy cow! What is going on here?
He stood like a statue for several seconds, watching, listening to the air.
Kris had been raised a Catholic and had strong faith in God, but he wasn’t prone to wild visions or angelic visitations. He worked with numbers—with facts that could be added and subtracted, balanced and verified. This, though, he couldn’t explain with a calculator or spreadsheet.
Continuing on to start his workday, he also couldn’t get his encounter with “the voice” out of his head. Within the hour, he was inside the blood bank, signing up for the bone marrow registry.
About four months later, in Toulon, Illinois, a wife and mother of a pregnant daughter faced her own unusual situation. To help make ends meet, Sarah Gibler was working a pair of jobs, including as a caregiver for two people with Alzheimer’s. Tired and needing time off, she asked an acquaintance named Carol to fill in one evening at a client’s home.
That night Carol had a strange dream. She saw the bedroom door open, and through it walked a balding man wearing suspenders and a white T-shirt with holes in it. With the help of a cane, he walked to the end of the bed and said to Carol, “If Sarah doesn’t see another doctor, she’s going to die.”
The next morning Carol related this unusual vision to Sarah. At the description of the man’s appearance, Sarah’s eyes got bigger and bigger.
“That’s my dad,” she whispered. “That’s exactly what he looked like.” Carol had never met or seen a picture of him. David Rutter, Sarah’s father, had died of a heart attack four years earlier.
Sarah didn’t feel sick, just exhausted from work, and she quickly forgot about the dream. But a couple days later she nearly collapsed, suddenly unable to see or walk. Her nephew took her to a new-in-town physician who within two weeks had diagnosed a form of myelodysplastic syndrome, once known as pre-leukemia, a disease marked by severe anemia and bone marrow failure.
Average age at diagnosis is sixty-five; Sarah was thirty-five. There was no known cure. Her only chance was an experimental procedure to replace her bone marrow with a suitable match. Without a willing match, she would die.
Tests of family members were negative. Then she discovered that state law prohibited Medicaid from funding a search through the National Marrow Donor Program registry for an unrelated potential donor, which would cost thousands of dollars. Her husband, Jim, was a plumber, and the Giblers didn’t have the money to pay for the search. Her prospects were grim.
Yet she wouldn’t give up, and she decided to improve her odds. After all, she had a granddaughter on the way and a life to live. She alerted the media and contacted state politicians, including David Leitch of the Illinois General Assembly. Leitch, who’d just recovered from brain cancer, took special interest, and before long the law was changed. Sarah Gibler became the first person to receive state funding to search for an unrelated bone marrow donor.
Kris Sorenson had been told the chances he would be a match were about one in ten thousand and that he might never hear from the program at all. He was shocked when a few months after signing up he received a registered letter saying he was a potential match for an unnamed recipient. Was he willing, it asked, to continue with the process?
Absolutely, he thought, remembering the voice he’d heard in the early morning hours. This is no accident. It’s like God is tapping me on the shoulder because there’s something special he wants me to do.
Against odds of about one hundred thousand to one, more tests confirmed Kris to be a perfect match for—in fact, almost a genetic twin to—the anonymous recipient. One official said, “She really is lucky to find somebody like you. Only a few people ever match up that perfectly.”
Though he was a little nervous about the next step, there was no way he’d drop out now. His supervisors enthusiastically supported the NMDP’s request that he receive a few days of administrative leave. The program then arranged to fly him to the nation’s capital.
On June 9, 1994, Kris found himself on an operating table at Georgetown University Medical Center. He was thirty-seven, the same age as his mom when she’d passed away from lymphatic cancer. He wondered if a bone marrow transplant could have saved her.
A nurse hovered over him for a moment. “It’s really great that you are willing to do this,” she said.
“I feel privileged,” he answered. “How many people are tapped to do something like this for another human being?”
The moment’s drama hit him as the anesthesiologist prepared to put him under. He saw another nurse in the corner, wearing goggles, in white sterile gear from head to toe. She held an igloo-shaped cooler, just over a foot tall, for holding the marrow to be extracted. Kris knew an ambulance and a plane stood by to whisk the precious cargo to wherever the recipient awaited.
That same day Sarah Gibler lay on an operating table at University of Iowa Medical Center, scared and fighting for her life. She’d been in the hospital more than three months, enduring chemotherapy and countless blood transfusions. But now her body was giving out. Doctors told Jim that without the marrow transfusion, she likely would die the next day.
She wasn’t afraid of dying but of leaving her family behind. If I die, I know I’ll be with God, so that’s awesome, she thought. But I have to fight to stay alive for my husband, daughter, brothers and sisters, and grandchild.
So she prayed as Kris Sorenson’s bone marrow was delivered, as doctors worked to place it into her body, as family and friends stood by. Everyone had the same question on their mind and in their heart.
Would it work?
Kris sat in an anteroom in a Red Cross medical facility in Peoria, Illinois. It was July 6, 1995, more than a year after the dramatic procedures at Georgetown and the Iowa Medical Center. He had recovered quickly, and in the ensuing months he’d been allowed to correspond with the woman on the other end of his “gift.” Per program policy, her identity had never been revealed to him, since recipients often do not survive the first year.
Yet Sarah Gibler did live. With the help of medication, her body accepted the new marrow—with a few changes. She now had Kris’s blood type, brown hair that had turned from straight to wavy, and cravings for caffeine, though she never drank coffee before. Through their correspondence, Kris and Sarah formed a bond, exchanging enough letters to set a program record. They also gave the NMDP representatives an idea: Donor and recipient should meet in person at a press conference celebrating the occasion.
That is how Kris found himself in Peoria, listening to congresspersons and doctors talk about the donor program and the story of Kris’s link to Sarah.
Finally, he was invited forward. Network and newspaper cameras captured every move as he walked to the stage during a standing ovation. Amid the dignitaries was Sarah, beaming, her eyes welling with tears. They held each other in a long embrace.
“Thank you,” she whispered in his ear. “Thank you. Thank you.”
“It was my pleasure,” he whispered back. “I’m so happy I was able to do this for you.”
Sarah was given back the opportunity to enjoy time with her mother, husband, daughter, and grandchild, which she thought she’d lost. More recently, when Jim was struck by a car and suffered a brain injury, she found herself better equipped to care for him, more patient and empathetic.
Through all the ups and downs, she also has sensed a change in her relationship with God. “Since the transplant, I feel such a close connection to him,” she said. “He’s shown me just how quickly my life could be gone, and yet he spared me. He had his reasons for allowing me to be inflicted with such a rare disease. Maybe it was to help change that legislation. Or maybe it was to prepare me to better help my husband. It’s amazing all that’s been thrown at me, but I’ve been able to get through it by praying and by faith.”
Kris, now a Catholic priest, says his encounter with the mysterious voice has profoundly influenced him as well. He still can’t explain it but remains deeply thankful that he listened and obeyed when he could’ve shrugged his shoulders and hurried on with life. He keeps in touch with Sarah and feels part of the family she cherishes. Unquestionably, as the years pass, the enduring memory is of that moment when the two of them met for the first time.
“It was as emotional and thrilling as you can imagine,” he recalled. “When I could look into her eyes and see the love, appreciation, and gratitude, that’s about as close to heaven on earth as anyone can get.”