Zoe Dudzianiec needs help.

The eight-year-old from Tecumseh suffers from Diamond-Blackfan anemia, a rare blood disorder in which a person’s bone marrow fails to produce enough red blood cells to transport oxygen from the lungs through the body.

Just to survive, Dudzianiec must receive 10 hours of medical treatment every day. She travels to Toronto for a transfusion every 10 days, as the blood she requires is not available to her in Windsor.

Her best treatment option is a stem cell transplant — and that’s where the help comes in. She hopes that a stranger will be able to save her life by registering as a bone marrow donor and matching her.

The UWindsor Blood Club and the Katelyn Bedard Bone Marrow Association will host a “Get Swabbed” event to identify potential donors Thursday, Nov. 23, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the CAW Student Centre Commons.

Registrants must be between the ages of 17 and 35 years old, and the need spans all ethnicities. All it takes is a simple swab of the inside of a cheek — less than 10 minutes to help Zoe Dudzianiec and almost 1,000 other Canadians seeking their match.

The Katelyn Bedard Bone Marrow Association was formed in July 2005 by Windsorites Bryan and Joanne Bedard, who lost their daughter Katelyn at the age of 3 to leukemia. A worldwide search of over 10 million people in the donor registry at that time did not turn up a match for her. The message was clear — there simply are not enough people registered.