Lu Zikuan was 11 years old and weighed 30 kilos when he learned he was the only family member who was a match to donate bone marrow to his father.
The doctors required him to weigh at least 45 kilos before they could operate. So the boy, from the village of Xijingyu in Henan, China, started eating five times a day. Eggs, braised meat, noodles, double portions at dinner. Sometimes he was already full, nauseated, and had a stomachache, but he kept eating. He drank hawthorn water to help with digestion and stepped on the scale after every meal.
His mother, who works at a market, looked for discounted meat to feed him. His father, Lu Yanheng, had been fighting leukemia for seven years and initially said no: he didn’t want to ruin his son’s future. Zikuan insisted: “I have plenty of blood. Take mine”.
In three months, he gained 15 kilos and reached the required weight. On September 9, 2019, his father’s 34th birthday, he donated bone marrow to him at a hospital in Beijing. His story went viral and, according to HypeFresh, fundraising campaigns raised more than 120 thousand dollars to cover the treatment. His father recovered, he returned to class, and he started a new plan: lose all the weight he had gained out of love.
