‘My life was saved by a stranger on the other side of the world’

Freemason Alastair’s stem cell donation saves life of a man in the ‘last chance saloon’ - Provincial Grand Lodge of Lincolnshire

Alastair Hawken is urging fellow Freemasons to sign up to the NHS Stem Cell Donor Registry that enabled him to save the life of a complete stranger at the other side of the world. Australian Luke Melling had been fighting Hodgkin Lymphoma for 12 years, and thought he'd beaten it not once but four times

‘My life was saved by a stranger on the other side of the world’

(BBC) – A man with a rare form of blood cancer has travelled 10,000 miles to meet the stranger who saved his life. Luke Melling, 31, from Melbourne, Australia, says he was “staring death in the face” before receiving a stem-cell transplant from Alastair Hawken, of Grantham, Lincolnshire. The match between the pair was so perfect that the men now believe they could be distantly related, as both their families hail from Preston, Lancashire – the t…