O.C. filmmaker holding out hope of finding a bone marrow match at drive-up event Sunday

Paul Goodman was 25 years old in 2016 and having the time of his life working as a camera operator for high-octane shows like the Discovery Channel’s “Whale Wars,” when the first signs of trouble struck.

That summer, the guy who’d logged more than 100 days of high seas adventures with a crew chasing ships in Antarctica, China and across the equator began to get inexplicably tired and felt under the weather. It was like a bad cold that wouldn’t go away.

When he suddenly went blind in one eye, he called his primary care physician, who told him to come in for some tests. His parents were at his side when Goodman received the frightening diagnosis.

He had acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Cancer. He needed treatment right away.

“I was kind of in shock,” the Tustin resident, now 29, recalled. “It was only when I looked at my parents that I realized what kind of mess I was in.”

Goodman underwent transfusions to counteract his own cancer-ridden blood. Then came the chemotherapy, which he would endure for the next three years, aggressive at first and then less with each subsequent year.

Tustin resident Paul Goodman in 2019, while filming “Evergreen,” an Eight East production.

(Courtesy of Paul Goodman)

It helped. By the end of the first year, Goodman was in remission. He felt better and used the downtime during rounds of chemotherapy to write screenplays.

In 2019, Goodman wrote and shot a full-length feature film “Evergreen,” which was released in August of 2020. A road trip tale shot over one month along the West Coast, the movie garnered some promising acclaim and awards.

But last Thanksgiving, while living with his girlfriend in Las Vegas, Goodman felt some masses on the back of his neck. He texted his doctor, Hoag Hospital oncologist Diana Hanna, who advised him to come home right away.

The cancer was back and had spread to Goodman’s lymph nodes, metastasizing to his brain and spinal cord. Although he would undergo more chemotherapy, the only hope now was a medical miracle — he needed a bone marrow transplant.

“It’s obvious my bone marrow is incapable of surviving on its own,” said Goodman, who moved back to Tustin and has been living with his parents. “That’s the only cure we have right now.”

Although he’s been on the Be the Match bone marrow registry since 2016, no donors with enough matching indicators have been located among the 35 million registered.

As the son of a Japanese mother and a white father with Eastern European Jewish ancestry, Goodman’s chances of finding someone who’s a perfect match are incredibly slim. His own sister, Laurie, has so far been his closest match — at 50%.

That’s why Los Angeles-based nonprofit Asians for Miracle Marrow Matches (A3M) has stepped in to assist. The group recruits potential registrants from cultures where organ, blood and marrow donation is not as widely accepted or understood.

The group hosts drive-through bone marrow drives intended to welcome donors who may have similar cultural and ethnic backgrounds as patients in need.

On Sunday, A3M is hosting a drive-through Be the Match event specifically for Goodman at Orange County Buddhist Church in Anaheim, from noon to 4 p.m. People simply pull up, fill out an online application and take a cheek swab to be entered into the registry.

Interested donors can also text “Hope4Paul” to 61474 from home and have a swab kit mailed to them with a free return envelope to send back.

“A lot of people don’t have a perfect match in the system,” said spokeswoman Athena Asklipiadis. “We see these trends in different groups — you could inherit a really rare genetic combination that makes [finding a match] difficult.”

Goodman is one of 144,000 people currently searching for a life-saving match each year, according to A3M, now in its 30th year of pushing for the diversification of donor registries. About one in 430 people who sign up to be donors end up matching someone in need.

That’s why it’s important for people to sign up.

“If even one person shows up, that person could be a match for somebody,” Asklipiadis said. “That one magical person could show up, and that person could be you.”

Orange County Buddhist Church is located at 909 S. Dale Ave., in Anaheim. For more about Paul’s journey, visit a3mhope.org.

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