Birmingham schoolboy gets gift of life for Christmas
BIRMINGHAM schoolboy Amun Ali is spending Christmas full of new hope after a kind-hearted stranger responded to his year-long appeal for lifesaving bone marrow.
Dad Ashgar Khan, aged 42, said doctors feared Amun would die within two years if a donor was not found. Now the 11-year-old, of Watts Road, Small Heath, has undergone surgery and is spending the festive season under the watchful eye of doctors and nurses at Heartlands Hospital’s children’s ward.
The outcome was a huge relief for Amun’s dad and mum Najma Rabia, who lost their four-year-old son Jabran to the rare severe immune deficiency syndrome.
The condition left their sons vulnerable to infections.
And because Amun is Asian, he had only a 125,000-to-one chance of finding a donor match, against a one-in-three chance for a white person.
Amun regularly appeared in the Birmingham Mail and campaigned with Desi Donors in an attempt to find a donor for himself – and to encourage other members of the Asian community to become donors.
Najma, aged 37, said: “Amun has been at a hospital in Newcastle to receive the bone marrow but he has been allowed to come back to Birmingham over Christmas.
“We are being cautious as he is not out of the woods.
“Without the people who went to the donor days, Amun would never have had this chance, but there are many more children like him they will save too.”
The new bone marrow should create white blood cells in Amun’s body so he can fight infections.
Amun, a pupil at Somerville Primary School, stayed on a sterile ward while he waited for a donor to be found.
