He laughs and talks about his day from the hospital bed. As if he were on vacation and not seriously ill, fighting death.
Henning Baumann (30) does not want to be defeated. Despite a diagnosis that only reached him in January: a particularly rare and aggressive type of leukemia. First he came to the hospital in Weißensee, from there he went directly to the Buch Clinic for treatment.
Shortly before the video call with the BZ, he had chemotherapy and radiation. “Today it was two treatments, sometimes even four,” he says. “But I took it well today and I feel okay.”
So that he is not alone, his parents have just moved from Bremen to Tegel into a small apartment: “We really wanted to be with him, suddenly everything else was no longer important,” says his mother Beate Baumann (60), who gives him when possible to bring home-cooked food to the hospital. The diagnosis came as a shock to the family, and now they are fighting together for their son.
But radiation and chemotherapy won’t do the trick. “The doctors said very quickly that I would need a stem cell donation and that I would not survive otherwise,” says Henning Baumann.
That is why the search is now underway for a genetic twin whose tissue characteristics match. “I therefore ask everyone to type themselves,” he says. “Because so far no suitable donor has been found.”
Here’s how you can help
Anyone who is healthy and between the ages of 17 and 55 can help Henning and other patients around the world and find out more with just a few clicks www.dkms.de/henning order the registration documents home. Registering yourself is easier than a corona test.