HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — A South Florida teen battling an aggressive illness is waiting on a lifesaving blood donation requiring a rare match.

Life now for Gigi Felix is day in and day out at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital.

“I just feel like I’m a part of the family here,” Felix said.

It wasn’t always like this.

“I was a pretty active kid,” Felix said. “I was in a bunch of different things like chorus, karate, piano.”

But the now-18-year-old says she can’t do those things anymore.

“The older, I got the more complications I got,” Felix said.

The complications came from sickle cell disease, an aggressive form of the inherited blood disorder, leaving her in constant pain.

“The best way I can describe it is a bunch of wooden splinters and like, under your skin, flowing throughout your body,” Felix said.

A cure is just within reach. Her older brother, a perfect match, has already agreed to donate his bone marrow.

“That’s the one thing that he’s doing for me that’s going to save my life and I’m very grateful for him,” Felix said.

But the only thing keeping her from this lifesaving procedure is a lack of compatible blood.

“She has had multiple transfusions over the course of her life and anybody who has a lot of transfusions ends up building antibodies to red blood cells and she has so many antibodies to red blood cells that finding compatible blood for her is very challenging,” Susan Forbes, of OneBlood, said.

Doctors performing the transplant need 50 units of blood on hand and that blood needs to be a very specific type in order to work in Felix’s body.

The nonprofit blood bank OneBlood is calling for African American donors, or donors of African descent. They must also have the O-negative blood type.

For perspective, only 7% of the population even has O-negative blood. Statistically, only 1 in 1,000 individuals of African descent will be a blood match.

“Only about 4% of African-Americans are donating blood, yet they are the people most likely to be a match for a sickle cell patient,” Forbes said.

“I have a bunch of friends with sickle cell who have it way worse than me and we all are in this together,” Felix said.

For now, Felix is imagining life after her transplant, doing the things sickle cell has kept her from doing, like going to college and spending time with friends and maybe going somewhere cold.

“I want to go to Canada. I want to go. I don’t know, just somewhere cold to see snow, because that’s a really big trigger for me, the cold weather,” Felix said.

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