College shot putter, Cameron Lyle, gives up athletic career to donate bone marrow
We are in awe of this college athlete’s selfless act to help a stranger.
Cameron Lyle, 21, is a shot put star at the University of New Hampshire. CBS reports that he spent the past 8 years training for his final America East conference this month, but earlier this year he decided to end his career just months shy of the competitions in order to become a bone marrow donor.
According to CBS, Be The Match, the national bone marrow registry, paid his school a visit during his sophomore year, and Lyle and his teammates were all swabbed to find potential matches.
The chances of finding a perfect match outside of immediate family members are about 1 in 5 million. However, just over two months ago, Lyle received a call saying they had found a 100 percent match — and it was a man suffering from a rare form of leukemia with just 6 months to live.
“I said yes right away,” Lyle told Today. “And then afterwards I thought about everything that that meant giving up.”
The marrow extraction procedure would leave Lyle unable to lift more than 20 pounds for a month while he recovered. To save the man’s life, he would have to make the donation just before the culmination of the track and field season,effectively cutting short his athletic career, Today reports.
Nevertheless, he says he, “never had a second thought about donating.” “If I had said no, he wouldn’t have had a match,” he told Today.
Lyle headed to Massachusetts General Hospital last week where doctors successfully collected his bone marrow. The recipient’s operation took place the very next day, Today reports, and even though his college athletic career is over, Lyle has no regrets.
“You can’t measure life against anything,” Lyle told ABC. “When you have an opportunity to save someone, you gotta go for it.”
