Little boy eats five meals a day to save his father's life
![The boy is eating five meals a day to save his father from leukaemia. [Photo: Getty]](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/a25kggO5QKhksgVzjGLA0w--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyNDI7aD05MzI-/https://media-mbst-pub-ue1.s3.amazonaws.com/creatr-uploaded-images/2019-06/60f7be00-8d11-11e9-a4f7-07c9786af8b9)
11-year-old, Lu Zikuan, is eating at least five meals a day in a bid to save his father from leukaemia.
The boy’s dad was diagnosed seven years ago and needs a bone marrow transplant.
Often, bone marrow transplant matches come from within your family, which is also the case for the Lu family.
He will need to weigh at least seven stone (45kg) before he can be considered as a suitable donor.
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Ideally, bone marrow donors need to weigh 50kg.
When the boy’s parents found out he was a match, Zikuan weighed 30kg.
For six years, his father Lu Yanheng from Xinxiang, China, was treating the leukaemia with medication.
However, his health started to deteriorate in August 2018 which led to him having a blood transfusion.
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In order to encourage his weight gain Zikuan has been eating mainly fatty meat with rice and is now just 2kg off of his target weight.
Zikuan’s weight gain hasn’t come without its challenges. When some of the pupils in his class noticed he was gaining weight, they called him fat.
They quickly stopped when the realised the reason, but Zikuan was unfazed by their comments.
He said to local media: “Save dad first, lose weight later.”
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His story has been shared across social media prompting people to describe him as “amazing” and a credit to his family for “shouldering this responsibility at such a young age.”
In order to be a bone marrow donor, you have to have matching stem cells to the person you’re donating to.
The match is more likely to come from your family with a 1 in 4 chance that you’ll be a match with your siblings.
However, many people with no relation to the person they are donating to are matches. That’s why there are a range of different donor registers in the UK to match people up effectively.
