Bone marrow drive goes on

CANTON — With a few friends from the football team watching, Jeremy E. Ramos stuck a long swab in his mouth and swirled it around the inside of his cheek.

He was signing up Monday to be a bone marrow donor at St. Lawrence University's student center, along with hundreds of other students, faculty and staff.

It was too late for them to save the woman who was the reason they were there.

The Be the Match bone marrow registration drive, organized by the university's women's hockey team, was originally intended to help find a donor for Yale team member Mandi J. Schwartz, but she died April 3.

"No one deserves to get leukemia, but especially no one like that; she was an awesome person," goalie and drive organizer Nicolien A. "Nikki" Bongaerts said. "It's obviously very sad that she passed away, but I think it's also part of the reason so many people are here today, because it's still recent."

In the first hour and a half of the drive, organizers estimated more than 200 people swabbed their cheeks, all that is required to get on the national registry.

Ms. Bongaerts and a few of her classmates remember playing Yale when Ms. Schwartz was still on the team. She was diagnosed with leukemia in December 2008. Since then, her university has sponsored several registration drives and her story has gained attention in the New York Times and on ESPN.

"Our league is pretty small. All of us have grown up playing against people or gotten to know people playing them," said Brooke E. Fernandez, who plays defense on the SLU team. "She was a very talented hockey player. When we heard she was sick, we wanted to make sure we did our part to help because Yale would have done the same for us."

The team has also raised money, to be donated to Be the Match, Ms. Schwartz's family and a scholarship in her name at her high school in Saskatchewan. More than $1,300 has been donated so far, Ms. Bongaerts said.

Putting aside their traditional rivalry, all of the women on the hockey team were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Ms. Schwartz's name and number — 17.

"I know that a lot of lives have been saved because of this," the SLU goalie said. "Yale's bone marrow drive last year, they found four matches. Even though they didn't find one for Mandi, that's four lives they saved."

The team decided to go forward with the drive because members of the Yale hockey team called them and told them they should. April was the earliest they could schedule the drive, to ensure that it didn't affect their hockey season.

Students from across the campus came out to register. The line to fill out the paperwork and get the swabs done was at least 10 people deep throughout the morning.

"My coach had a bone marrow transplant and he encouraged us to come out and just to get this process done, just for the sake of giving support to my coach and all of the other people who are suffering," said Mr. Ramos, a Spanish major from Staten Island.