How Matt Skeet survived leukaemia, thanks to a UK student’s snap decision to register as a stem cell donor

When cancer came for Matt Skeet, it was fast and unforgiving. Life as the 41-year-old and his young family knew it was upended in a matter of minutes on a summer’s day in early 2021 in their home town of Albany. The festive season had been punctuated by intense fatigue and painful varicose veins in Matt’s leg. At his wife Jodene’s urging, the father of two made what he thought would be a quick trip to Albany Health Campus to investigate, intending to be back home in time to host friends for dinner. It was another 18 months before he saw his home again. It took doctors less than 30 minutes to diagnose Matt with acute myeloid leukaemia, an aggressive form of cancer which affects the blood and bone marrow. Within a couple of hours, he was on board a Royal Flying Doctor Service flight to Fiona Stanley Hospital, with no time to come to terms with the life-altering diagnosis. By the time Jodene had packed a bag and driven to Perth the next day with their daughters Poppy, 7, and Maggie, 5, her husband was undergoing chemotherapy. “If you had told me in that first 24-hour period exactly what our next two years were going to look like, I would have collapsed and not gotten up,” she tells STM. *** Matt, a New Zealand-born drilling contractor who regularly worked away, and his schoolteacher wife were in the thick of juggling their demanding jobs with a busy home life when he suddenly became unwell. They would soon yearn for those days as their world shrank to a single focus: keeping Matt alive. Jodene recalls rushing into the leukaemia ward upon arriving at FSH. It was here that the enormity of the battle ahead started to hit home. “(Doctors) said ‘There’s no time. If we don’t start (chemotherapy), he’s dead in two weeks,” she recalls. Acute myeloid leukaemia is an aggressive and fast-moving cancer, and it requires an equally aggressive and fast-moving response. For one month, Matt stayed in hospital, undergoing a rigorous chemotherapy regime. Having abruptly left their lives in Albany, Jodene moved into her uncle’s home in Leederville and enrolled their daughters at a local school, desperate to create a sense of routine during the uncertain times. “We never told the kids that dad was going to be OK, because we didn’t know,” she says. “I would always say he has specialists helping him and they are doing their best, and for the kids, that was enough, to know everything that could be done, was being done.” The couple dealt with the news in their own, different, ways. Matt remained positive and stoic, refusing to believe the cancer would claim his life. “You never think anything like that is going to happen to you, I was very naive,” he admits. “I didn’t understand what leukaemia was, and I thought it was really survivable, no big deal. But it pretty quickly dawned on us how serious it was.” His wife was the researcher, the one with all the questions, who needed to seek out the statistics, to know exactly what they were dealing with. Matt’s specialist, FSH and Clinipath haematologist Dr Matt Wright, says acute myeloid leukaemia usually hits patients like a bolt from the blue. “The cancer is acute because it presents fast,” he says. “The reason it is fast is because the cancer cells are very young and rapidly dividing. “So you can go from being well to unwell in a matter of weeks, with no sign of the cancer until it’s obvious. “There’s nothing wrong with you, and the next minute someone says you’ve got this life-altering cancer.” The chemotherapy temporarily sent Matt’s cancer into remission, but as Dr Wright explains, some patients — including Matt — possess markers or mutations in their cancer cells, which means there is a very high risk of the illness returning. It is these patients who need a stem cell transplant to survive. “The chance of relapse could be as high, in some cases, as 80 per cent . . . it was particularly risky in Matt’s case,” Dr Wright says. “So the idea of the transplant is to reduce the chance of it coming back. The way it does that is, one, you give the poor old patient really high doses of chemo (prior to the transplant) and secondly, you use someone else’s blood cells which then produce a (new) immune system inside your body. “And what that is doing is acting like a police force, a new police force, permanently keeping the cancer away.” Matt didn’t know it at the time, but an international search for a stem cell donor began just two weeks after his diagnosis. The best donor is usually a sibling, but 70 per cent of patients who need a transplant don’t have a family match. Developed nations co-operate on a world bone marrow donor registry, made up of more than 20 million volunteers willing to offer up their cells to save a stranger’s life. In Australia, healthy people aged between 18 and 35 can either fill in an online form to receive an at-home cheek swab kit, or can ask to sign up to the stem cell and bone marrow registry when donating blood. When a match is found, based on immune gene types, the donor is then contacted and asked if they are willing to participate. “It’s remarkably easy,” Dr Wright explains of the process. “The long and short-term risks (to the donor) are basically none, and in doing such a simple thing, you can save a life in a way that costs you nothing.” *** Kate Oakes can’t remember exactly what made her stop at the information stall promoting stem cell and bone marrow donation during her orientation week at Leeds University in 2011. But once she heard the phrase “it takes two minutes and you could save someone’s life”, the British woman was soon undergoing a cheek swab. She forgot all about the encounter until she received an email a decade later, in February 2021, informing the 29-year-old she was a match for someone who was fighting for life, and asking if she would undergo a blood test with a view to donating her stem cells. “I was shocked, I was not expecting it,” Kate tells STM from the UK. “They explained what was involved and I said ‘absolutely, let’s go ahead’.” Upon receiving the incredible news a match had been found, Matt had to undergo a torturous two-week chemotherapy regime to prepare his body to receive the stem cells. “I was probably a little bit outside of my body and outside of my head — I didn’t really comprehend how bad things were,” he says. Jodene, on the other hand, was acutely aware. “I think (watching the two-week chemotherapy) is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says. “They are killing everything in order to receive the new cells so they took him right to death’s door.” Considering what was at stake, the transplant itself felt strangely simple, and anticlimactic. Kate received four injections in the days leading up to the donation to stimulate her stem cells, before spending six hours in hospital where the stem cells were harvested, in a process akin to donating blood. With the world still operating in a post-COVID era, the stem cells were frozen and shipped to Australia to avoid a catastrophe such as transit delays. Upon arrival they were defrosted immediately before the transplant, with no time to waste. The procedure was a success, but another battle lay ahead. The next 100 days would determine if Matt’s body accepted the stem cells, and during this time he was severely immunocompromised, at risk of complications and infection, and battling constant nausea. By this time the family had bought a home in Leederville, and when Matt was finally allowed home six weeks after the transplant, he was kept in isolation until the 100-day milestone. Matt recalls his wife becoming consumed with fear, understandably still traumatised by an incident at home after his first bout of chemotherapy when an invisible waterborne bug on a piece of lettuce made her husband so sick he almost died. “I firmly believe that going through something like this, as hard as it is on the person that’s sick, it’s harder for the family that has to watch on and to handle everything,” Matt says. “Jo and the girls went through way more than what I did . . . I just had to get up and fight it, and everyone was caring for me. “Jo was trying to live a normal life for the girls, put on a brave face leaving the hospital, not knowing if I’m going to be alive when she gets back.” But the 100-day milestone came and went, and Matt slowly began regaining his strength as his body welcomed its new immune system. *** For two years, Kate went about her life in Britain, with no idea about the fate of the stranger who had received her stem cells. Once an enforced waiting period has lapsed, donor and recipient are permitted to contact each other provided both parties are willing, and she was overjoyed to discover earlier this year the man who shared her immune system was not only alive and well, but wanted to meet her. So on June 23, a Brit, a Kiwi and three Australians walked into a bar in Bakewell, Derbyshire, in the UK. The Skeets were overcome with emotion as they hugged Kate for the first time, fulfilling a promise to themselves and their kids during the bleak days that if a perfect match was found, they would do whatever it took to thank them in person. “I was quite emotional. Within a couple of minutes it was like being with an old friend,” Matt remembers. “It was really important to me for Kate to meet Jo and the girls to show her how big her act was — that I’m still here because of her.” As she handed gifts to the two beaming little girls before her, it was clear to Kate just what had been at stake. “What they went through as a family, to even be a small part of that story, you can’t even put it into words,” she says. “I’ve recommended to everyone I know to sign up to the register. It’s such a small thing to do, to give such a big thing.” The Skeets combined the trip to meet Kate and her husband with a memorable backpacking adventure across Europe, soaking up the time with their kids. It was also a chance to reflect on the unexpected, unwelcome, chapter of their lives as they prepare to embark on a new one. Four years after leaving Albany, they are finally going home for this next chapter. The Perth house they never planned to buy, which became a home as they fought, and healed, together, has recently been sold. It became a sanctuary, seeing both the dark days and the brightness that emerged. “Having gone through this, we’ve been able to see the other side, and there is so much good out there,” Matt says. They have felt it constantly. It was in the friends and family who raised $53,000 for cancer research during Dry July; in the new school community which arranged a fundraiser at a local bowls club; in friends in Albany joining forces to furnish the Skeets’ new home as their world was unravelling. It was there in neighbours who organised meal deliveries every week; and in the strangers in a fine dining restaurant who, upon seeing a clearly very unwell Matt and his wife in tears, not knowing they were discussing logistics in the event of his death, secretly paid for their meal. And, above all, it was felt through the incredible gesture of a university student in a Sliding Doors moment almost 14 years earlier, that allowed Matt to stay where he belongs — alongside those who love him. To register to become a stem cell donor visit https://stemcelldonors.org.au/join-the-registry/