Race Against Time: International Search to Find Donor Match for Hockey Player Fighting Cancer

June 19, 2010 — -- Mandi Schwartz began skating almost as soon as she could walk, beginning a journey that would take her from a tiny town on the Canadian prairie to the Ivy League.

As a forward on Yale University's women's hockey team, she was admired for her tenacity, her endurance -- a string of 73 consecutive games played -- and her kindness.

"This is the daughter everybody wants," says Tedd Collins, a doctor who has come to know Mandi well. "If you could imagine having a kid, this is the kid you want."

But today, Mandi, 22, is facing a challenge far bigger than any she faced on the ice.

"She called me from the doctor's office," recalls Hillary Witt, Yale's former hockey coach. "She said, 'I have leukemia.' I almost fell off my chair."

The team rallied around her, wearing her No. 17 on their helmets, leaving her spot open during pre-game introductions and keeping her jersey in the locker room, even on road trips, as she underwent chemotherapy back home in Canada.

But 18 months after being told she has acute myeloid leukemia, Mandi now needs something her teammates can't provide, a bone marrow transplant, or, better yet, a transplant of umbilical cord blood.

And she needs it soon. If doctors don't find a perfect match in about 30 days, they'll go with an imperfect match, which could be fatal.

Friends, teammates and hockey players have embarked on a desperate international search to find a suitable donor, a task complicated by Mandi's mixed Russian, Ukrainian and German heritage.

In the middle of it all is Collins, an immunologist who knows exactly what Mandi is going through.

His daughter Natasha, a promising medical student at Yale, battled the same type of leukemia but died last August. In the hospital, she made a last request.

"She said, 'One day dad, maybe you can't help me, but hopefully you can help other people. And she told me about Mandi."

Mandi's friends and Yale teammates have organized bone marrow donor drives, adding more than 25,000 people to bone marrow registries.