- April 29, 2024
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Fay and Mike Crites are working together to try and beat Fay's leukemia while spreading awareness to the best of their ability.
A couple of years ago, Mike and Fay Crites were informed that Mike’s wife, Fay, had been diagnosed with leukemia. Now, fighting for her life, they are trying to find a match for a bone marrow transplant.
Before being diagnosed, Crites said that she had begun to feel weak in the legs and felt the most fatigue she has ever felt through her entire body. That’s when she decided to go, with her husband, to try to get to the bottom of what might have been happening in her body.
“I was like the Energizer bunny,” Crites said. “I would always be moving and never get tired. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, all that energy I once had was lost.”
The couple then went to a doctor where they found out the only possible way for Crites to beat this type of cancer was to find bone marrow that could match her blood-type and to perform surgery to transplant that bone marrow.
Throughout the past two years, because of her condition, Fay Crites could not do many of the things she used to be able to on a daily basis.
“We used to go to the farmer’s market every Saturday,” said her husband, Mike Crites. “The condition she has just makes it impossible to do that now with her because her body cannot handle it.”
According to Mike Crites, they also have many visits to the Mayo clinic in Jacksonville each week to see where the cancer is and stabilize it as best they can.
“The best thing we can do is hope and pray that there might be somebody down the road who has that bone marrow,” said Crites, “People don’t realize how simple it is to donate blood and how much of a help it is to save a life.”
The Crites couple also said that 1 in every 540 people who donate blood actually are a match and that 63 percent of people who are diagnosed with leukemia actually find a match and survive.
“That means that the other 37 percent are just out of luck,” Mike Crites said. “The more people in this world that donate their blood to help these people, the more of a chance there is that there can be a match and someone can save a life.”
The Crites ecnourage people wanting to donate blood or that have the cancer and need to find a match should visit bethematch.org and see what options are out there.
“Primarily, these blood donors only accept people between the ages of 18 and 44, because that’s the age where the blood thrives the most,” Crites said. “But, anybody who can donate and save a life would make just that much of a difference.”
Fay and Mike Crites are still very optimistic about their future together, even considering the circumstances.
“We’ve been together since high school and married for the past 48 years,” Mike Crites said. “After she beats this, we were thinking about taking an RV trip cross country, maybe visit Alaska.”
