In the Fight of His Life, He’s Looking for a Perfect Match : Health: San Pedro’s Gary Rogosic, who has leukemia, hopes Saturday’s blood-test drive will turn up a bone marrow donor. The odds are 1 in 20,000.

Saturday afternoon, at San Pedro’s Peck Park Auditorium, 24-year-old Gary Rogosic will kick off a campaign to save his life.

Diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia and lymphoma in July, 1992, Rogosic, a father of twin 14-month-old boys, is seeking a matching bone marrow donor for a transplant operation. Saturday’s drive, in which blood samples will be taken from donors, will run from 1 to 4 p.m.

Already, friends, family and even strangers have rallied to Rogosic’s side since news of his donor search was made public, he said. The outpouring of support gives him confidence that a match will surface, in spite of the 1-in-20,000 odds of finding a donor.

“It’s been amazing how just even total strangers go out of their way, just to see how I am and give me hope that I’ll get a match,” said Rogosic, a San Pedro resident who works at the Unocal refinery in Wilmington.

Each blood sample costs $45 to test for a possible match. But the Rogosics don’t expect donors to foot that bill. Independently of Saturday’s event, the family is raising money to pay for the testing.

So far the Red Cross Los Angeles County chapter, Rogosic and his 20-year-old wife, Carrie, have received about $15,000, including money raised from tickets sold for a benefit dinner at the San Pedro Fish Market on Thursday night.

“I hope nobody doesn’t show up Saturday because they don’t have the money or feel embarrassed about not having money, because that’s what these benefits are for,” he said. “I’d hate to think somebody stayed away when they could maybe be the match.”

In spite of their ordeal, the couple said their spirits are not low.

“In the beginning it was hard, but we’re all right now,” said Carrie Rogosic. “There are some days when we get a little down, but usually we’re all right.”

Gary Rogosic said his moods often swing with his physical health, which of late has been capricious. And the new spotlight on their lives has required some adjusting, he said.

“It’s kind of hard, because I’d rather be the focal point of all this attention because I’d done something good, not because of this,” he said. “I don’t want anybody pitying me or feeling sorry for me. But I do need their help. I need a lot of help.”

Bone marrow matches usually are found among people of the same ethnicity, although cross-ethnic matches have occurred, said Marie Staie, donor coordinator for Red Cross’s county chapter. Rogosic, who is part Irish and Croat, is most likely to find a match with a person of European descent, she said.

People who attend Saturday donor drive will be asked to fill out consent forms and to donate two or three small vials of blood, Staie said.

The results from those samples will be entered into the National Bone Marrow Donor Registry of 890,000 names and compared with the blood of leukemia patients nationwide, not just Rogosic’s, she said. Thus, samples that don’t match Rogosic’s blood might lead to a match for someone else.

Data on Rogosic’s blood has been compared to all the blood information on file at the registry, but no match has been found.

While the registry receives a steady trickle of donors, Staie said, it typically receives big boosts when many donors enroll at once to help one specific person.

“Gary’s situation is typical,” Staie said. “People become involved when it’s close to home. He’s a young man and just starting a family and it tugs at your heart.”

Since 1988, the Red Cross has matched 71 donors and patients in the Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Orange county area.

The Rogosics plan another drive in October. In the meantime, friends and family across the nation are being tested. Rogosic’s mother, who lives in Reno, Nev., is organizing donor drive efforts there, and his aunts and cousins in Ireland also have been tested.

“That’s opened up a whole new batch of possibilities, because they have a registry in Ireland that’s not connected to ours,” Gary Rogosic said. “I just sent over my blood work to be matched with all the names over there. So that’s another batch of people to hope about.”