Donn Landholm, a 69-year-old special assistant on University of Houston football coach Willie Fritz's staff, spent 18 days isolated in a hospital room at MD Anderson after receiving a stem cell transplant that doctors said was his only path to survival. On Friday, nearly 19 months after that February 2025 procedure, he finally meets in person the woman whose cells saved his life — a Michigan firefighter and mother of two named Morgan Chalup, who until now has existed to him only as an anonymous match on a national registry.
A Diagnosis That Sent Landholm Searching Beyond His Own Family
Landholm was diagnosed with CMML-1, or chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, a disease that, according to Blood Cancer United, affects roughly four out of every one million Americans each year, striking a median patient between 72 and 75 years old and appearing about twice as often in men. Allogeneic stem cell transplantation is the disease's only known cure, per the same source, which meant Landholm needed a matched donor and needed one fast. His brother and sister were tested and were not suitable matches, and his youngest daughter, Kate, came back as only a 50 percent match, according to reporting by Houston Chronicle writer Joseph Duarte.
That outcome is common rather than unusual. NMDP registry data cited by BVM Sports shows that roughly 70 to 75 percent of patients who need a stem cell transplant do not find a full match within their immediate family, since complete tissue matching among siblings occurs in only about a quarter of cases. Landholm was placed on the national registry, which today includes about 9 million potential donors in the U.S., the Houston Chronicle's report noted, and he underwent five rounds of chemotherapy in July 2023 before further chemo cleared out diseased cells to make room for the transplant he would eventually receive on February 4, 2025.
A Firefighter's Five-Day Commitment in Grand Rapids
The woman who matched him was Morgan Chalup, a firefighter and EMT with the Glen Lake Fire Department in Empire, Michigan, who had joined the NMDP registry in 2022 alongside a UH staffer named Sarah Lienard, who joined the same year. When Chalup was notified she was a match for someone needing a transplant, she said she intended to donate whenever she was called, the Chronicle reported. On January 8, 2025, Chalup underwent a seven-hour donation procedure at the Versiti Blood Center of Michigan in Grand Rapids, giving peripheral blood stem cells after receiving five days of filgrastim injections to mobilize those cells into her bloodstream. That collection method, known as PBSC apheresis, accounts for roughly 90 percent of all NMDP donations and does not require surgery or general anesthesia, according to NMDP.
Chalup, who lives in Empire with her two children, Kate and Emma, has spent more than seven years with the Glen Lake Fire Department and was elected vice president of the Glen Lake Firefighters Local 5086 union executive board in January, according to meeting minutes from Glen Arbor Township. Landholm remained isolated in his hospital room for 18 days after the transplant, then spent 100 more days isolated at his home in Pearland, the Chronicle reported. Roughly three dozen of his co-workers on the UH football staff held signs outside his hospital room during the ordeal, a gesture Landholm has said made the experience life-saving and life-changing.
Twelve Months of Silence, Then a Search
Federal rules bar donors and recipients from exchanging contact information or meeting for a full 12 months after transplant, with all early communication routed anonymously through transplant centers, according to NMDP guidelines. That waiting period is why Landholm and Chalup could not learn each other's identities until both parties signed mutual consent forms nearly a year after the procedure. In February 2026, Landholm contacted MD Anderson about connecting with Chalup, setting in motion the reunion that finally brings the two together this week.
Landholm returned to the office and the sidelines 19 months after his transplant, coming back for the Cougars' 2025 spring game and keeping a practice checklist scrawled on a piece of white paper as he eased back into his routine. He still wears protective clothing and accessories to guard against skin-cancer risk, a precaution tied to his post-transplant care. A bone marrow biopsy in August confirmed he has been in remission for six months, and his next checkup falls on the two-year anniversary of his transplant, February 4, 2027.
A Reunion Built Into Game Week
Landholm and Chalup are set to meet in person for the first time on the University of Houston campus, with Chalup and her family attending Saturday's game against Southern at TDECU Stadium as special guests. The moment caps a career that has taken Landholm through more than 40 years in college football, including eight seasons as Tulane's Director of Player Development under Fritz from 2016 to 2023, a stretch that included back-to-back 10-plus win seasons and a Cotton Bowl win over USC, according to his UH Athletics staff biography. He moved to Houston alongside Fritz in January 2024 when Fritz took the head coaching job.
UH's football program has run donor drives each of the past three years, and this weekend's game doubles as another recruitment push, with on-site cheek-swab registration and stadium activations aimed at adding new names to the registry, per UH Athletics. The Get in the Game program behind those drives traces back to 2008, when former Villanova coach Andy Talley partnered with NMDP after first hosting campus registry drives at Villanova in 1992; the initiative now works with more than 500 college teams and has registered over 236,000 potential donors nationally, according to the Andy Talley Bone Marrow Foundation. Earlier this month, NMDP announced the program had surpassed 2,000 completed donations while its collegiate recruitment endowment fund reached $1 million, per a GlobeNewswire release.
Landholm's story joins a growing list of matches born from college athletics registry drives. Hoodline reported last month on Valparaiso football captain Kevin Johnson, who registered through his team's Get in the Game drive and went on to donate stem cells that saved a 5-year-old boy. For Landholm, whose diagnosis carried odds far more common in patients decades older, Friday's meeting on the UH campus turns what was once an anonymous act of registry generosity into a face-to-face thank you nearly two years in the making.
