Why I Contacted My Husband’s Bone Marrow Donor

For Ethan, that nearly perfect match was with a then-36-year-old Austrian man named Dominic.

On August 23, 2023, after multiple tests, Dominic, accompanied by his husband, Michael, underwent the day-long donation process at Vienna General Hospital. His stem cells were sent to Cleveland, where, on Sept. 1, they were infused into my husband.

Donor and recipient information is kept confidential. At the time, all we knew was that Ethan’s donor was a 36-year-old man from Europe. We were told, as was Dominic, that we would have to wait two years before we could know the donor’s/recipient’s identity.

Until that time, we could send anonymous messages to each other through the donor programs. In the days after Ethan’s transplant, I drafted a note in my head to his donor, but I never got the chance to send it.

Joy Frank-Collins (left) and her husband, Ethan, celebrate his "re-birthday" - the day a bone marrow transplant patient receives their donor cells - in his hospital room at the Cleveland Clinic September 1, 2023. He celebrated his 49th birthday two days later.

Courtesy Joy Frank-Collins

A rare complication from the transplant, combined with the standard pre-transplant regimen of intense chemotherapy and radiation therapy, proved too much for Ethan's body to bear. He died on Sept. 27, 2023, just 24 days after his 49th birthday.

Since then, I’ve often thought of Ethan’s donor. In April 2025, I reached out to the transplant coordinator at the hospital where my husband was treated, completed a waiver releasing my contact information to the donor system and waited.

In less than two weeks, I received the name, address and email of Ethan’s donor. And then it dawned on me that I was going to have to tell him that his pain and inconvenience were for naught. I decided I would give myself a few days to figure out how to respond. But the day after I received his contact information, Dominic emailed me. He knew Ethan had died and said he cried upon hearing the news.

We’ve since traded many emails, participated in a radio interview on Austrian national radio, and friended each other on social media. While our initial conversations were centered on the stem cell transplant, we’ve since ventured into discussions about work, politics, travel and cooking. Dominic and Michael have invited me to visit them in Austria. My sons, ages 23 and 21, and I are hopeful to do that this fall, maybe even participating in an event there to enroll more would-be donors.

People have asked why I sought out Dominic. Obviously, I wanted to thank him for submitting himself to an uncomfortable medical procedure to help someone he didn’t know. But I also wanted to tell him that his selfless donation gave us hope and a goal to push toward on the hard days. The promise of the transplant enabled us, in those months leading up to the procedure, to continue to create memories with family and friends that we’ll always hold close.

Even though my husband didn’t survive his transplant, the one-year survival rate for transplant recipients is 80 percent, according to NMPD. By sharing his story, I hope I’m informing people about the need for bone marrow transplants and donors, giving other people diagnosed with blood cancers a chance of beating the disease. 

Even if I weren’t a new widow, I think I’d still struggle sometimes to find a bright spot in the barrage of daily news headlines. But then I remember that half a world away is a man who volunteered to save a stranger. We should all be so lucky to have a Dominic in our lives.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.