Lucas Loriman’s serious illness and donor search

Lucas Loriman’s serious illness makes finding a suitable donor an urgent family and community concern. The search brings medical compatibility into the center of family life: Dante Loriman is not a good match, Susan Loriman is a better one, and the possibility of a genetic relative raises questions about Lucas’s parentage that Susan has long kept unresolved. The effort to help Lucas therefore becomes both a practical campaign for donors and a test of what family means when biology and upbringing do not neatly align.

Illness and the Medical Search

Lucas has focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), and his family is seeking a donor. The medical discussion distinguishes between being a parent and being a suitable donor. Ilene Goldfarb explains that the ideal result is a six-antigen HLA match. Based on Dante’s typing, he would not be a good candidate; Susan is a better match, though not a perfect one. The results give the search a concrete medical framework, but they do not identify an available donor or guarantee a match.

Ilene also explains why a sibling could be especially useful: each child inherits half of their antigens from each parent, leaving a sibling a twenty-five percent chance of being an identical match, a fifty percent chance of a half match, and a twenty-five percent chance of no match. The figures make genetic relatedness consequential in a way it had not been in the family’s daily life. Kinship is no longer only a matter of who raised Lucas; it may affect the odds of finding the donor he needs.

A Family and Community Campaign

Susan asks whether there is news from the donor banks and learns there is none. She and Dante respond by organizing a donor drive rather than waiting passively for a match. Susan visits Lucas’s elementary school, where Jill Baye is also a student, and speaks with teachers who support the idea. Their plan is to hold a drive the following Saturday and encourage people to sign up with the donor bank. The search thus reaches beyond the household and into the school community.

The campaign continues through repeated personal appeals. Joe Lewiston finds another flyer and note from the Loriman family in his school mailbox—the third he has seen. It announces that a medical professional will come through the school the following Friday to take blood tests, and it asks readers to help save Lucas’s life. Susan has also contacted Joe by email and phone, urging him to take part despite his having never taught her children. The flyers and requests turn the donor search into a recurring presence in the school, asking its adults to act on behalf of a child they may know only indirectly.

Parentage and Compatibility

The donor search exposes a distinction already present in the Loriman family. Mike Baye tells Susan that Dante is not Lucas’s biological father. At the consultation, Dante’s poor match makes that information immediately relevant to the search, while Susan’s result is better but still not ideal. Mike presses Ilene Goldfarb on whether a doctor should disclose a medical problem discovered in someone who is not the patient. His question challenges the boundary between medical confidentiality and the wider consequences of information that could matter to a family seeking help.

When Ilene asks Susan who Lucas’s father is, Susan answers that she does not know. The answer leaves the uncertainty explicit rather than resolving it. Later, Susan privately reflects that Dante is Lucas’s true father in the sense of the life they share, even as the question of biological paternity remains unsettled. She recalls that, after an assault, she and Dante were together repeatedly around the time Lucas was conceived; she had believed the timing made Dante’s paternity likely and had tried to put the alternative out of mind. The account establishes neither certainty nor a confirmed biological father. Instead, it shows how the medical search forces an old uncertainty back into view.

The Possible Genetic Relative

When Susan later asks Joe to donate, she is prepared to explain why his family connection may matter. Joe’s brother Curtis Lewiston died eleven years earlier, or nine months before Lucas’s birth. Susan is ready to tell Joe that a genetic uncle could offer the best remaining odds of finding a suitable donor. This possibility links Lucas’s need to Joe’s family, but it does not settle the underlying question: Susan has already admitted that she does not know who Lucas’s biological father is. Curtis’s relationship to Lucas is therefore raised as a consequential possibility, not presented here as a confirmed fact.

Joe initially appears ready to object. Susan hopes he will not, but she is prepared to disclose the family history because Lucas’s need has become more pressing than her wish to preserve the silence. The nurse approaches with the means to take a blood sample, and Susan appeals to Joe to help. The passage ends with his response still unresolved; it does not confirm that he agrees to testing or that his blood provides a match.

Care Beyond Biology

The donor search repeatedly places genetic relationship beside demonstrated care. Dante is the father who has raised Lucas, and he and Susan organize a drive together even though Dante is a poor match. Susan’s willingness to approach Joe rests on the possibility that biological kinship could help medically, not on a claim that genetics replaces Dante’s place in Lucas’s life. The distinction is sharpened by her private insistence on Dante as Lucas’s true father while she faces the practical value of identifying a genetic relative.

The campaign also draws others into responsibility for Lucas: teachers support the school drive, Joe is asked to submit to testing, and the nurse arrives to collect blood. Yet the search remains uncertain at the close of the available account. No donor match or medical outcome is reported. Its significance lies in the way an urgent need turns hidden family history into a potential resource, while leaving intact the more complicated truth that biological connection, medical usefulness, and parental devotion are not the same thing.