by Liz Gaufberg
Nalini Ambady, whose survival depends on finding a bone marrow donor in the coming weeks, with her daughters.
Psychology professor Nalini Ambady, formerly of Harvard and Tufts and now at Stanford, has leukemia and just weeks to live unless she finds a bone-marrow donor who matches her, most likely one of South Asian descent. Her family and friends in academia and beyond are mounting an extraordinary public effort to save her, including attempts to use the findings of her field — social psychology — to motivate potential donors. (See, for example, this Psychology Today post: Point. Click. Save This Woman’s Life.) Here, Dr. Liz Gaufberg, of Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, shares her own plea with the public to help.
This April vacation, my husband and our teenaged daughters decided we needed a true break. We booked a beach resort and made a pact to unplug. No cell phone. No texting. No Facebook. No Internet. No TV. We’d read books, eat meals together and talk about what matters to us. We made only one exception to the no-technology rule: Nalini.
My dear friend Nalini is in a race against time with leukemia – searching, hoping, waiting for a bone marrow donor to save her life. I am in the habit of speaking with Nalini almost every day. Everyone agreed I would be allowed to go to the hotel lobby to email her and visit her CaringBridge Site. If Nalini took a turn for the worse, I would leave our vacation early.
Here is a thought experiment for you. If there were someone like Nalini who needed you, would you try to help? What if it wasn’t even hard or scary or dangerous to do? I can assure you that Nalini is real and she is wonderful. She is my friend.
Will you do what you can to save her life? For donation information, and additional coverage of the efforts to save Nalini, please go to www.helpnalininow.org.
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(Thanks to reader)