Saving lives is really in this hero’s bones
Published: January 20, 2006
Brooklyn firefighter John Jensen saved a woman from the clutches of death - 360 miles from the city, without ever picking up a hose or an ax.
His only tool lay inside his 30-year-old bones: his stem cells.
Two years ago today, a batch of stem cells Jensen donated was surgically transfused into 27-year-old Brooke Williams, an upstate mother and college student suffering from acute leukemia.
Williams was so close to dying that she had been making her own funeral arrangements and trying to decide who should care for her daughter, who is now 8, when she learned that her doctors had found a donor.
Thanks to Jensen, Williams is now rid of the blood-based cancer that ravaged her body. Today, at the FDNY’s headquarters in downtown Brooklyn, she will finally meet her hero.
“Thank God it was him,” said Williams, who traveled from Gouverneur, N.Y., to Manhattan yesterday with her mother and 19-year-old sister. “If he hadn’t done it, who knows what would have happened?”
She can’t wait to hear his voice.
“I am excited. It’s almost more relaxing than anything else,” she said. “Him being a firefighter on top of that. I mean how much more could you do?”
But Jensen, who signed up to be a donor while he was in the Fire Academy at Randalls Island five years ago, shrugged off any mention of heroics.
“I just hope she is doing well. I hope that everything works out and she can live a good life,” said Jensen, who is assigned to Ladder 174 in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. “I’m definitely looking forward to meeting her face to face.”
His tissue type was a perfect match for Williams, one out of the 10 million people on the worldwide donor list, said Melinda Caltabiano of New York Blood Center, which helped coordinate the bone marrow transplant.
When the New York Blood Center called Jensen about a possible recipient in September 2003, he didn’t hesitate.
Sacrificing time away from his wife, Gianna, and his three children, ages 2, 4, and 6, the Staten Island smoke-eater underwent a series of blood tests and medical examinations at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and took three weeks off from work in January 2004.
A week before the donation, he got hormonal injections to boost his body’s stem-cell output - leaving him home with flulike symptoms and unable to play with his daughter, who had been born only months earlier.
“I didn’t give it a second thought,” he said. “I just feel that I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing that I didn’t help someone.”
Since then, Jensen has learned the transplant went well, but he never reached out to Williams. “I felt it wasn’t my place,” said Jensen, a former emergency medical technician.
Jensen will be honored today alongside a former city firefighter-turned-Nassau County cop, Joe Kazlauskas.
Their names will be added to the “Honor Roll of Life,” a plaque of 72 firefighters who have donated bone marrow, which includes stem cells, to 78 patients with ailments ranging from leukemia to Hodgkin’s disease.
“The Fire Department is the one group that consistently has been so supportive,” said Caltabiano, the blood center’s director of special donor services. “It’s an extension of their everyday lives.”
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