MEETING MY STEM CELL DONOR | Dianne Silvestri

 

They kept your name 
from me for a year. 
Even then, not ready, 
I sought real survival. 

At last I wrote you. 
By return mail you sent 
a photo of you grinning while   
reclining through the harvest 
of your cells to be flown
on ice to me, nearly empty 
of life, bleached clean 
of resistance. 

Six years later, on a mid-
June morning, I swung wide 
my front door to you, 
taller than I’d expected, 
smiling, extending a full 
grip of white and fuchsia-pink 
long-stemmed peonies 
to celebrate our bond.

How oddly casual, 
your consent years ago 
for a swab of your cheek 
to have your chromosome 
mapped, in case someday 
it might match someone 
desperate to live.


Dianne Silvestri, poet and physician, is author of But I Still Have My Fingerprints (CavanKerry Press, 2022), which recounts her journey to recovery from leukemia and stem cell transplantation. Her poems have appeared in her chapbook Necessary Sentiments, JAMA, JAMA Oncology, American Journal of Nursing, Journal of Radiology Nursing, The Healing Muse, The Examined Life Journal of the Carver College of Medicine, Pulse, Barrow Street, Main Street Rag, Naugatuck River Review, Evening Street Review and elsewhere. Several of her recent works reflect on people close to her receiving critical diagnoses. Since retirement from medicine, she advocates for medical humanities through speaking and teaching.

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