Two weeks after Madalayna Ducharme's story was shared, around 800 people in the Windsor-Essex community have registered to be a stem cell donor.
Representatives from OneMatch say this will have a huge impact on the nearly 800 people in Canada waiting for a match.
"What those people are doing is providing hope for anyone around the world who is in need of a match. In order to find a match it's very difficult but having 800 more people added to the registry in a matter of days is certainly helping that," says Sharr Cairns with Canadian Blood Services.
Cairns says the dedicated events have been very successful and traffic has increased at the Canadian Blood Serivces office on Grand Marais.
"In one week we usually expect to see approximately 10 people or so come in to do what we call a self-swab at our Windsor blood donor clinic, in one week since Madalayna's story hit the news we had 72 people come in, so that's more than what we'd see in a couple of months," says Cairns.
Cairns says she doesn't have the figures just yet but they have also seen an increase of people registering online.
Madalayna Ducharme (provided by Tamara Ducharme)
Another event in Ducharme's honour is scheduled for University of Windsor on February 6, 2017 from 10:30am-3:30pm at the CAW Student Centre. Anyone wishing to get on the registry can also attend the Canadian Blood Services office on Grand Marais during office hours or register online.
Five-month old Ducharme was recently diagnosed with malignant infantile osteopetrosis, which doesn’t allow the bones to work properly and can cause vision and hearing loss. The disease causes the bones to be too dense, pushes out bone marrow and affects liver and lung functions. She needs a stem-cell donor to stop the disease.