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Paula Trivette of Greensboro found a beautiful bouquet of fresh flowers delivered to her home Feb. 25 with this note: “You will forever be a part of us. Thank you so much for my life. With much love, Jeff Lines.”

After receiving the flowers and special note, Trivette said she cried tears of joy all day. Lines was a stranger to her when she donated life-saving bone marrow for a transplant in 2007.

Trivette received the first contact through an e-mail from Lines’ wife, Cheri, Feb. 22:

“Dear Paula, We can’t believe it’s you. It seems like we have been waiting forever to learn who you are. There is not a day goes by that we don’t think about you and all you have done for our family. Jeff is 44 and was diagnosed with leukemia three and a half years ago.
Thanks to you, he is doing really well, not to say it has been easy, far from it, but getting stronger every day. My name is Cheri and we have been married 23 years, two kids 19 and 16. We live in Colorado and want to know all about you.

“We will never be able to express how eternally grateful we are to you and all that you went through for us. You have literally saved his life and given me back my husband. Thank you so much, with much love, Cheri Lines”

Then on Feb. 23, Jeff Lines wrote, “Dear Paula, Thank you for saving my life! I’ve been waiting 15 months to say that.”

Trivette learned Lines was only 40 when he discovered, through a routine blood test, he had leukemia. Only when he had been told to call the Rocky Mountain Cancer Center for an appointment did the reality of the words sink in.

During the weekend, an oncologist told him the cancer was growing fast but was caught in time to be treated, and chemotherapy was started.

“You will go through five different stages with one of them being the 'why me’ stage,” a pastor had told him. Lines responded that he was thankful it was he and not one of his children with the disease.

During the next nine months, Lines had many days in the hospital, followed by shots and blood transfusions. He had to give up his job at UPS with only three and a half years to go for early retirement. He was appreciative when his good friend from high school gave him a job working for his company as a natural gas scheduler.

After a year in remission, Lines noticed a large bump on his leg and thought he had a spider bite, but it was a staph infection. He also had the flu and pneumonia. Worst of all, the leukemia had returned.

Because his oncologist told him he had less than a week to live if he didn’t start another consolidation round of chemo, Lines spent another 31 days in the hospital getting more chemo treatments while Rocky Mountain Cancer Center searched for a bone marrow donor.

Finally, Lines was told a perfect match had been found, but there were a few red flags. The donor was a 54-year-old woman, had two children and was about half his size.

The morning that Lines was supposed to get the transplant, he was told the doctors were unable to get the stem cells from the donor (Trivette) and that they were going to try to get them through her jugular.

“It was a very scary time,” Lines recalls, “because I was a day from dying without them.” After the successful transplant, Lines spent 32 days in the hospital and was able to come home for Christmas.

During one of their first conversations, Trivette told Lines the delay in getting the stem cells to him was because she had to take large doses of blood growth shots to produce the marrow for a person twice her size. The cells clotted when the doctor tried to get them through her arm, so she had to spend the night in a hotel and return to the hospital the next day to have them removed through her jugular.

Because of “red tape,” it took almost 18 months for Lines and Trivette to find each other.

“I knew she was a special lady when I first spoke to her,” Lines said, “and I was so moved to think she went through this difficult procedure for a complete stranger.”

Lines said he has enjoyed communicating with Trivette by phone, e-mail and letters. “Hopefully, one day I can meet this wonderful lady that saved my life,” he said.

When asked if she would ever consider donating stem cells again, Trivette replied, “Most definitely I would!”

“A donor can only donate stem cells/bone marrow twice in a lifetime, and I have already told Jeff, Lord forbid, if he needs more cells, they are his for the asking,” she said.

Trivette considers what she went through in the donation process small, compared to Lines, who was hospitalized 122 days and received more than 200 blood growth shots and 100 blood transfusions.

But what Trivette did was extraordinary. Lines’ daughter Brittany refers to Trivette as “our guardian angel.”

“We all want to be a hero to someone,” Trivette said. “For me, it’s not so much being a hero in their eyes but knowing that I saved a life and gave back a husband and father to a family. That really thrills me. Not everyone is so blessed.”

To nominate a person for this column, contact Peggy Longmire at rlongmire@triad.rr.com or 288-9040.