The Kindness of Strangers : They turned out to help Roger Kahl, a police officer who is dying of leukemia. Their bone marrow didn’t match his, but others--people they might never meet--have gotten the gift of life.

When El Segundo Juvenile Detective Roger Kahl began campaigning for people to register as bone marrow donors, he was looking for someone to save his life.

More than two years later, no donor has been found for Kahl, whose battle with chronic myelogenous leukemia forced him to retire from the police force last month after a 26-year career. Doctors now believe it is too late for him to have a transplant, even if he does find a suitable donor.

But at least one--and possibly more--of the 1,000 people who signed up to try to help him has instead saved the life of a stranger. That one life, Kahl said, makes all his efforts worth it.

“We’re able to know for certain that we were able to save at least one person,” he said.

Despite the expense, emotional demands and frustration of his unsuccessful search for a donor, he’d “do it all again today, in a minute. . . . I think the greatest gift you can give is someone’s life, or a chance to live. You can’t give anything better than that.”

For three South Bay residents who have donated bone marrow to help people they have never met, no words could be more true.

“It’s amazing to be a participant in a miracle,” said Linda Diggles, 42, whose bone marrow was given to a Canadian baby born without an immune system. “I’ve been blessed with very, very good health and a wonderful immune system and to be able to share that, well, I’d do it every week if I could.”

But it is extremely unlikely that Diggles, or anyone else, would be called on to donate marrow twice in one lifetime, experts say.

Exact matches between unrelated donors and patients are so rare that few of the 500,000 people currently listed on the donor registry are likely ever to be matched to a patient, said Elisabeth A. Quam, director of public education for the National Marrow Donor Program, based in Minneapolis.

Experts estimate that the odds are 20,000 to 1 that the marrow of an unrelated donor will be compatible with that of a patient. Some blood antigen types are so rare that the odds increase to as much as a million to one, Quam said. Since the program started in 1987, it has matched about 1,200 donors with patients.

Fewer than 200,000 people were listed on the registry in 1989 when El Segundo residents began to rally behind one of their favorite police officers.

Through what now has become an annual 5K race called Roger’s Run and other local fund-raisers, more than $115,000 has been donated to pay Kahl’s medical bills and provide initial blood tests needed to add names to the registry.

Judy Herrmann, a resident of Manhattan Beach and a longtime friend of Kahl’s mother, was one of hundreds of South Bay residents who volunteered in 1990 to have two tablespoons of her blood tested at one of the El Segundo fund-raising events so she could join the registry.

“I did what I could for Roger . . . (and) afterward I thought nothing of it for at least a year,” said Herrmann, whose husband, son and daughter-in-law also signed up. “Then they called me and told me I was a preliminary match for this 34-year-old woman. I thought it was incredible that I could match anything.”

After Herrmann passed two more compatibility tests for the leukemia patient, Herrmann said she became very excited.

“It’s like a lottery,” she said. “This is something most people can’t do and I can.”

But Herrmann told registry doctors that she had had mild anemia most of her life, which had disqualified her from even donating whole blood at community blood drives. Because her marrow so closely matched that of the dying woman, however, doctors decided that Herrmann would be able to make the marrow donation if she took large doses of iron in the weeks beforehand.

The iron made her “hungry as a horse,” said Herrmann, who gained a stubborn 10 pounds, which she said has been difficult to lose, in the process.

A Red Cross nurse began frequent visits to the El Segundo office where Herrmann is an income coordinator for Digital Corp. to draw blood and test her progress.

Reaction from her co-workers was mixed.

“They were curious as to why I would do it. A few felt that it was a great thing to do but it wasn’t my family, it wasn’t anyone I knew, so why was I doing it?” she said. “I had one person come up to me and say, ‘I would never do that in a million years. . . .’ That’s a very self-centered attitude, very unwilling to risk anything for someone else.”

Last Oct. 17, Herrmann was placed under general anesthesia while marrow was removed from her hip bone and flown to an undisclosed location for intravenous transplant into the woman. As with all marrow donors, Herrmann was asked to check into a hospital the day before her marrow was taken and to stay a second night after it had been removed.

“There’s not that much pain involved,” she said. “And what’s three days when you’re talking about someone’s life?”

Although she and the patient have exchanged anonymous letters through the registry, rules in effect at the time require that they wait six months before they can give one another personal information. Now the rules require a donor and recipient to wait a year before they may know more than the most basic information about one another.

“I just want to see what she’s like,” Herrmann said. “Obviously, we have very similar genes, so I’m just curious. . . . I feel bad that I couldn’t help Roger, but this woman sounds like a terrific lady. She’s someone I’d like to know.”

Laurie Szogas of Torrance says she too would have liked to have met the Minnesota youth who received her marrow last year.

But Donald Linn--once a husky outdoorsman with a ready smile and impish sense of humor--did not survive long enough for her marrow to implant itself into his bones. Less than two weeks after the transplant, the 18-year-old Linn died.

Still, Szogas said, the effort was worthwhile.

“I was pretty upset,” said Szogas, 30. “At first I thought everything had been a big waste . . . but I went into it knowing it could be like this, and maybe more people will survive this because of what they learned from me and from him.”

Linn and his parents sent her anonymous letters shortly after her October, 1990, donation was transplanted to him, thanking her for giving him a chance at life.

“I want to thank you for donating your marrow to me,” Linn wrote. “It’s better than winning the lottery. I won my life!”

After Linn died, Szogas and Linn’s parents sought permission to exchange personal information with one another. The registry agreed, and the Linns sent Szogas several photographs, including one of a beaming Donald triumphantly holding up the bag of marrow as it was fed intravenously into his system.

“We can’t thank you enough for giving him a second chance,” Donald’s mother, Sharon, wrote in an accompanying letter. “Only, God had different plans for Don and, as hard as that is to accept, we must.”

For Linda Diggles, donating bone marrow was a chance to release a baby from the isolation bubble in which he had been dying. At 8 months, the child had never been able to go home with his parents.

After hearing about the baby’s situation, Diggles, 42, said she urged doctors to hasten the time-consuming testing that must be completed before a transplant is done.

“His chances of living to be a year old were very slim,” Diggles said. “I was just so anxious to get on with the process.”

At UCLA Medical Center, where marrow is harvested from local donors and then rushed by air to the waiting patients, “they put you in the plush suite and treat you like gold,” said Diggles, a nuclear medicine technologist. “It’s hardly like being hospitalized.”

As with all donors, doctors warned that she would feel a bruised sensation for a few days, much like having fallen on ice.

“I’ve fallen on ice,” she said, “and I’ve hurt a lot worse than I did after this.”

A few months after the April, 1990, transplant, the child went home to his family for the first time in his life.

“I was just in the clouds,” she said. “You can’t imagine. How many times in your life . . . do you get a chance to save somebody’s life?”

How to Become a Bone Marrow Donor

Almost any healthy adult between 18 and 55 years old can become a bone marrow donor. Here’s how the process works:

* Potential donors call (800) 654-1247 for the location of the nearest testing center.

* At the center, two tablespoons of blood are drawn for the marrow test.

* Results are then entered into the center’s national computer system for comparison to more than 9,000 patients seeking transplants.

* If a donor’s compatibility is confirmed through further blood tests, a transplant date is set and the patient’s own marrow is destroyed through chemotherapy several days beforehand.

* The donor then is admitted to a hospital for an overnight stay and placed under general anesthesia. Needles are inserted in the pelvic bone through the small of the back to draw the marrow. Donors say the procedure causes a bruised sensation that lasts about a week.

* The marrow is delivered intravenously to the patient.

Source: National Marrow Donor Program.

BACKGROUND

About 500,000 people are now listed with the National Marrow Donor Program, which was founded in 1987. Currently, more than 9,000 patients are on the database’s waiting list, looking for what doctors still call “a miracle match.” Because bone marrow compatibility is tied to genetics, experts hope to increase the diversity of the donor pool, which now is mostly Anglo. About 30% of Anglo patients who search the database for a compatible donor find one, but fewer than 1% of all minority patients find a donor. Program officials are trying to coordinate special drives in minority communities to diversify the donor pool. The registry hopes eventually to maintain a database of 1 million donors willing to give some of their marrow to a dying person.