PHILADELPHIA – The University of Pennsylvania football program has been a loyal advocate of the #BeTheMatch program, with a yearly registry and regular programming bringing attention to the organization.
 
That has paid off directly: Five Penn football players have been matched as donors since the Quakers began their donor drive 13 years ago. The list includes Sam Philippi and Anthony Lotti, who have saved lives through bone marrow transplants just in the last four years.
 
Thanks to Mike Burkeitt, Penn Athletics can proudly add a person to the list of donors.
 
An Assistant Athletic Trainer who works with the Quakers' men's soccer, baseball and men's lightweight rowing programs, Burkeitt got the call of a lifetime in July.
 
"I was working from home, as we all are these days, and I got a call from Be The Match," he recounted recently. "They told me that I was one of eight people they were looking at as a potential match for a candidate, a man in his 50s who is battling leukemia. It accelerated pretty quickly from there, and suddenly I was their top choice for this particular patient."
 
To say that the call came out of the blue would be an understatement. Burkeitt joined Penn's athletic training staff in the summer of 2018, but it turned out his donation to Be The Match happened well before that. In fact, he was still a Temple undergrad.
 
"It's coming up on eight years since I got swabbed, the spring of 2013," he said. "A friend of mine had done it and so I thought it was a good idea. I've been on the Registry ever since. I recommend that everyone do it, it's a simple cheek swab and just that small step can be the one that eventually saves someone's life."
 
The cheek swab provides a person's Human Leukocyte Antigen, or HLA, which is used to match patient and donor compatibility for bone marrow or cord blood transplants. HLA are proteins, or markers, found on most cells in a person's body.
 
One of the interesting facts Burkeitt learned from the experience? The process has shown that, while you have a 1-in-4 chance of being compatible with a relative, you actually have a better chance of being compatible with a total stranger (as he was). The Be The Match program has different levels of donor/patient privacy rules, but Burkeitt explained that his case is "open" and so in about a year he might be able to find out exactly who he was able to help.
 
While Philippi and Lotti donated bone marrow through Be The Match, Burkeitt's procedure took him down a different donation path: Peripheral blood stem cell, or PSBC. As a result, for several days leading up to his donation Burkeitt was forced to take injections of a drug called filgrastim which increased the number of blood-forming cells in his bloodstream.
 
"My girlfriend, Lexi O'Hara, is a nurse at the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP)," he said. "So she was able to give me the injections without too much issue. Honestly, when it was all over the folks were telling me that they thought she was the one who did the heavy lifting!
 
"In all honestly, right off the bat they found out that we are both in the field and so they were able to talk a little more in-depth and with some greater scope. I think that was reassuring for all parties."
 
On Wednesday, October 14, Burkett went into the hospital, got his last filgrastim injection, and then was given a vein analysis. Typically, a PSBC donation is a non-surgical procedure in which blood is removed through a needle in one arm and passes through a machine that collects only the blood-forming cells. The remaining blood is then returned to the donor through a needle in the other arm.
 
It was here that the procedure hit a snag.
 
"My veins weren't strong enough," Burkeitt explained. "Instead, they had to insert a catheter into my jugular vein in the neck and ran it down to just outside my heart to a vein that pushes the blood above the heart.
 
"Honestly, it was a weird sensation—it felt like a beer bottle on my neck," he recalled. "It was this little incision, but so much blood comes out of it. You start hearing things like jugular vein and heart and you can imagine I was pretty nervous! But the doctor was super and said they do this all the time, and sure enough it only took them about 10 minutes to get everything in place. I was out of the hospital before the day was over. I was there for maybe eight hours overall, with about five hours of actual procedure."
 
Burkeitt's role as an athletic trainer has provided him with a unique perspective and more appreciation for his own life.
 
"In my job as an athletic trainer, there's obviously the tape jobs and the rehab and just taking care of my student-athletes' bodies," he said. "But there's also an element of the job that involves just being there for a kid when they're having a bad day. This procedure was a completely different experience—I was literally helping someone through my own body, giving them life. And I'm giving this life to a complete stranger, someone I know nothing about. That is so rewarding, to think that my body can help someone else's body so directly.
 
"There's very few times in life you're given the opportunity to help someone so deeply without doing too much," he continued. "Appreciate the little things, especially with the way the world is right now. If you can do something for someone, even if you've never met them, you just gave them more time in their life and with their families and friends.
 
"The odds that we've had three from the Penn Athletics community contribute so quickly is so small and that makes it so cool. I'm really proud to be a part of that legacy."
 
About the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP)
The NMDP facilitates unrelated marrow and cord-blood transplants as a single point of access for a long-standing collaborative network of national and international leading medical facilities in marrow and cord blood transplantation. The NMDP connects patients, doctors, donors and researchers to the resources they need to help more people live longer and healthier lives. For more information call 1(800) MARROW-2 or visit www.marrow.org.
 
About Penn and "Be The Match"
For each of the past 13 years, the University of Pennsylvania football team has participated in "Be The Match" drives with the NMDP. The initiative was started by former Villanova Head Football Coach Andy Talley, who has dedicated more than 20 years to raising awareness about the need for marrow donors and increasing the likelihood that all patients receive the life-saving transplant they need. Penn is one of more than 100 college football programs that participate in the program.