Positivity: West Chester Girl Meets Hero Who Saved Her Life
Last Update: 5/04 1:09 am
We appreciate you, we love you and you’ll always be a part of our life.”
What do you say to a man who saved your daughter’s life? For Sonya Guthrie, the feelings are beyond words. But she tried her best Saturday when she met Will Corey, a U.S. Navy sailor, whose bone marrow was a match for her daughter, Trinity. Corey traveled to Cincinnati from Washington D.C. to meet Trinity this weekend.
Guthrie remembers well the day she first took Trinity to Children’s Hospital. “October 27th, 2002, I took her to the hospital; thought she was constipated and found out her kidneys and spleen had swelled from Leukemia.”
“Two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy, the cancer returned, then she had to have a bone marrow transplant or she wouldn’t live,” said Guthrie.
That’s where Corey comes in. The sailor from Alexandria, Virginia happened to be a match.
“Being a parent, having children myself, it was something I didn’t have to think about” said Corey.
Corey, who is a father of four, says he never thought twice. Now, two years after that life-saving surgery, he’s touched at seeing the bubbly girl with a big smile, knowing he had something to do with the life she’s so full of
“Just to see her running around and happy and smiling, it’s great, and to hear she’s ice skating and doing things my daughter’s do, so it’s a good feeling” Corey said. Guthrie and her daughter hugged Corey and called him their hero. “Words cannot express how I feel. I’m very thankful.” Guthrie said. “I appreciate him, he will always be family, he’s a part of my life, a part of my daughter’s life.”
Trinity was admitted, she began chemotherapy, and spent months in the hospital.
As for Trinity, she’ll always remember the first time she met Corey. “I just looked at him and I just smiled and he just laughed a little bit and I was just really happy; it was my moment.”
“Quite literally, Trinity won the lottery,” said Scott Carroll, President of the Southern Ohio Chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
Trinity is also a hero for the Leukemia Society’s team in training. A group of runners running in the Flying Pig Marathon has raised nearly half-a-million dollars this year alone to fight leukemia.
In the past 20 years, Team in Training raised almost $900 million in the flight against blood cancers, and in those past two decades, incidents of death in childhood leukemias has dropped substantially. …..
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