Just about to start her senior year, Adrianna McLean was diagnosed with Aplastic Anemia, a rare bone marrow failure disease. Aplastic Anemia prohibits McLean from doing normal day-to-day activities. She can’t go swimming. She can’t go to school. She can’t go to buffets, and the list goes on.

“We can’t do anything that involves walking a lot or anything with prolonged standing,” said McLean’s friend senior Marena Nigro.

McLean is in waiting until she can get a bone marrow transplant, but a full match for bone marrow is rare. While waiting she is going through immunosuppressive therapy.

“It’s frustrating having to wait to see if this treatment will work at all, it could never work or it could work for months or it could work for the rest of my life. It sucks being in the unknown,” McLean said.

Her parents are only a 50% match for her. However, there is an international bone marrow transplant registry. But not all countries do all of the testing that the United States does, so the odds of getting the full match donor from the United States is very slim, according to McLean.

“You never know what’s going to happen unless you get it cured by bone marrow transplant, it’s all a process and you just have to have to be okay with nothing being guaranteed,” McLean said.

McLean goes to the University of Kansas Cancer Center twice a week to receive blood and platelets from blood donors. Without blood and platelets from other people, McLean would likely become extremely fatigued, and her blood would a difficult time clotting, making her bruise easily and be more susceptible to bleeding out.

To help McLean, people 16 and older can donate blood, and people ages 18 and older can go and get their bone marrow tested to be put on the registry of donors. Some places to register for bone marrow donation are “Be The Match” and “The Bone Marrow Foundation.” Some places in Kansas City to donate blood are CSL Plasma and the Community Blood Center. There are also annual blood drives at School.

“I urge anyone 18 plus to put themselves on the bone marrow donor list and anyone who can give blood 16 plus to do so because it will help people like me,” McLean said.