A local woman has just undergone a procedure at the London Clinic to donate life-saving stem cells to a young girl with blood cancer.

Amy Cowley, aged 21, of Glen Mona, signed up for the stem cell donor register when members of the Anthony Nolan Trust charity visited University College Isle of Man four years ago.

The charity did a mouth swab to find out her tissue type and she didn’t hear from them until four years later when they called to say they had found a match for her.

She said: ’I was a bit shocked.’

She immediately agreed to travel to London for an initial medical examination in September to see if she was a suitable candidate for the procedure, for which she travelled back again a month later.

Asked about whether this was difficult with the Covid-19 restrictions meaning she had to self-isolate on return to the island for a total of four weeks for the two trips, she said: ’It’s either saving a life or a little bit of hassle, I didn’t mind.’

Before donating, Amy said she had four days of injections in order to ’make sure your body produces enough stem cells.’

She added: ’The procedure was quite long, I went in at lunchtime and was in there for four hours.

’They put a needle in each arm and put the blood through a machine to filter all the stem cells out.

’Afterwards they had to do a count to see if they had enough stem cells, they wanted four to five million stem cells. ’

Amy donated 4.3 million.

She added: ’They told me a little bit of information about the person (that she donated to), and it turned about to be a little girl.

’It’s a really good feeling, to know you have saved someone’s life.’

Asked what she would say to people thinking about signing up for the register, she said: ’Just do it’

The Anthony Nolan Trust says about 30% of people in need can find a suitable donor in their family.

But the other 70% rely on a stranger to save their lives.

The charity says: ’We have over 750,000 adults on our register; we’re constantly working to increase that number. Every time someone comes to us in need of a transplant, we check our register for a match.’