{"id":3374,"date":"2016-02-24T12:44:14","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T17:44:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/?p=3374"},"modified":"2016-02-24T12:45:20","modified_gmt":"2016-02-24T17:45:20","slug":"his-fathers-hug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/his-fathers-hug\/","title":{"rendered":"His Father’s Hug"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pr<\/a><\/p>\n

It was a long, exhausting day. A little prick in the finger hardly registered with Yehudah as he went through all the red tape of his army induction. The prick had long healed when a call came in during his commander course. \u201cI was needed to save a life. It wasn\u2019t the kind of call you receive every day. I consulted with my Rav who advised me to do whatever is necessary. The life of another Jew was at stake. I was the only one in the entire world who was a genetic match to this person. My bone marrow would save him. It was all up to me.
\nBut it still wasn\u2019t real.
\nA year later, I received another call saying that the recipient wanted to meet me. That\u2019s when it became real. There was a person on the other end. Suddenly, these moments at the clinic last year took on a face and a name and a family and dreams.
\nThe recipient was Itai Chanan from Herzliya who discovered that he had blood cancer. \u201cOne day I came home with a sort of wound near my forehead, and on Shabbat morning, I woke up with a red, swollen face. Abba rushed me to the hospital. It was there that I heard that word: leukemia. It seemed as if it\u2019s a bad video that will be over soon. At first it was like a party. Everyone came to visit me\u2013 until suddenly, I grasped what was going on and then came the big shock.\u201d
\nAfter I completed the round of treatments, they told me I would need a bone marrow transplant and that one of the possible side-effects was\u2026 death. Now the ball was in my court \u2013 to decide whether or not to do it. But when they tell you that this is the only way to save your life, there isn\u2019t much of a decision to make.
\nMy sisters were not found to be compatible donors. Now what? After all, if my own siblings weren\u2019t a match, how could a stranger\u2019s DNA match?
\nI hadn\u2019t counted on a miracle. One of the many Ezer Mizion miracles.
\nWhen the recovery period was over, I returned to life, step by step. There is a period of time roughly defined as \u2018a hundred days of recovery.\u2019
\n\u201cA year after the transplant, Ezer Mizion asked me if I would like to meet the donor. We are both at a similar point in life, and the encounter was \u2026was\u2026I really have no words to describe it.\u201d \"pr<\/a>
\nYehudah agrees. \u201cIt was a very moving meeting. His father gave me a hug that is has become part of my very being to this day. No matter how I would describe the power of that embrace, it would only minimize what I felt at that moment.\u201d
\n\u201cI am married, \u201c continues Itai.\u201dand the father of a one-year-old. Sometimes I look around and think— all that would never have been if it weren\u2019t for Yehudah.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a long, exhausting day. A little prick in the finger hardly registered with Yehudah as he went through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,1],"tags":[10,4,196,197,37,23,11],"class_list":["post-3374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bone-marrow-registry","category-ezer-mizion","tag-bone-marrow","tag-cancer","tag-dna","tag-genetic","tag-leukemia","tag-registry","tag-transplant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3377,"href":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3374\/revisions\/3377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ezermizion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}