Donors Try to Match a Deputy’s Mettle

CASTAIC —  Sylvia Smith is going to fight for her life just as she fought to become a sheriff’s deputy.

A blood drive was held Monday at Pitchess Detention Center for Smith, one of 16 events staged throughout Los Angeles to help the 18-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who has leukemia.

Smith, 45, was told in October that she had the disease and needed a bone-marrow transplant. The blood drive helps to find a proper donor.

But because she is Latina and a low percentage of Latinos donate, the odds of finding a match are one in a million, according to doctors. Without new bone marrow, physicians say, Smith has six months to live.

But Smith said she faced tough odds at the sheriff’s academy when she was trying to get hired as a deputy and that she is not going to surrender to the disease.

At the academy, they wanted her to climb over a 6-foot wall to pass an agility test, and at 5 feet, 3 inches and 120 pounds, Smith, who was raising two children by herself at the time, saw the wall as an impossible barrier between herself and security for her family.

“I wanted that job more than anything,” said Smith, who is currently on sick leave from the East Los Angeles sheriff’s station. “I’m a fighter, not a quitter.”

She used to pick up her children from school and drive to the old academy in East Los Angeles to practice. While inmates at nearby Biscailuz Detention Center watched, Smith tried to scale the wall every day for two months.

The day she finally went over, she recalls, the inmates gave her an ovation.

Lea Michaels, 25, Smith’s daughter, said, “My brother and I watched her work to get over that wall. She beat that wall and she’s going to beat this.”

The leukemia, her doctors say, is the result of chemotherapy she was given to treat breast cancer in 1991. Smith had undergone a mastectomy two years before.

Her father died of lung cancer three weeks ago.

Only 8% of the 2.5 million bone marrow donors in this country are Latino, according to the National Marrow Donor Program Registry.

Cindy Gonzalez, who was donating blood Monday, said she felt she had to because she is Latina. “I heard it on TV and felt like I had to come down,” said Gonzalez, from Valencia. “I heard she had a problem finding somebody to help her because she was Latina. I felt I should help.”

Smith says the odds are frightening, but she sees an upside to the challenge of finding a suitable donor.

“Even if they can’t find a donor for me, the attention I receive will raise awareness to the lack of minority donors,” she said.