Roughly 2.5 years ago while on the Nativ College Gap Year Program, I found myself sitting in the basement of a Jerusalem hostel with the rest of my group. Just like most gap year programs and birthright groups in Israel, we had a representative from The Gift of Life Marrow Registry come to inform and educate us about the registry and most of all, empower us to swab and potentially save a life.

A simple swab of your cheek could help save a local boy. That is the message a Naples mom is desperate to get out. "It all started with him getting sick on a Saturday morning with the flu," Grae Salerno said. "By Sunday, we had to rush him to the ER." Grae’s son, Dalton, is fighting for his life after a sudden diagnosis of aplastic anemia in April. The condition is when the bone marrow stops working.

Mark DeFrancesco Jr., 26, never expected to see adulthood. When he was a child he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and at the age of 9, chemotherapy and radiation withered his body down to around 30 pounds. He was in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant, but despite testing drives throughout his home state of Connecticut and the support of his local community, no match had been found for DeFrancesco. Then "like a miracle," he told NJJN, a matching bone marrow donor, Samuel Aronoff of Highland Park, was found.

As a fruit and vegetable farmer, Douglas Young measures his life’s work by the seasons. Since receiving a stem cell transplant for his rare blood cancer, he has been able to enjoy more harvests than he once thought possible — inspiring him to seek out the stranger responsible for saving his life. In spring 2019, Young, a 62-year-old grandfather took a break from his Woodstock, Connecticut orchards and traveled to Boston for hellos and hugs with Timothy Hahn, the New Jersey accountant whose stem cell donation put Young on the road to recovery in 2016.

A Pasco County mother facing a leukemia battle received a life-saving transplant from a stranger in California. Amber Delgado's health took an unexpected turn back in 2012, before her twins were born. "I went to the hospital with a pain on my left side. My spleen was four-times bigger than what it was supposed to be," Delgado said. "They told me that I had cancer and it was called chronic myelogenous leukemia."

What are kids to do when life spirals out of their control and bad things happen to their loved ones? Those are the questions actress Vanessa Bayer tackles in her first children’s book, "How Do You Care for a Very Sick Bear?", a heartfelt story about sickness and the friendships that help make the hard times a bit more manageable.