Football fan Dan tackled leukaemia – now he wants you to join One Million United

LAST year, Dan Yeates spent ten minutes in goal for his South London five-a-side football team. 

For a man who a few years ago played top tier American football and considered becoming a professional cyclist, it wasn’t a great sporting achievement. But Dan was elated. 

“I’d gone to watch the boys but someone pulled a hamstring and I was drafted in,” Dan says. “It was amazing.”

Those ten minutes were a miracle – because in January 2020, Dan was diagnosed with blood cancer. 

Just 27 then and super-fit, Dan put feeling tired down to his 70-hour-a-week job in software sales and long-haul flights to visit his girlfriend Ruchel in Sydney. 

But a cough prompted him to visit a GP for the first time in seven years. He was prescribed antibiotics for a chest infection and given blood tests. 

A month later – when he should have been in San Francisco at a conference – Dan was at St George’s Hospital in London having a bone marrow biopsy. It showed that he had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a rare form of blood cancer.

“I had a 50-50 chance of making it to Christmas,” he says. “I cried for 20 minutes – then went into problem-solving mode. 

“There was a 50 per cent chance of surviving this – awesome. I’d do everything the doctors told me and bring a positive attitude every day.”

While Dan started six months of chemo and radiotherapy, Ruchel moved to London and his five-a-side mates visited him in hospital. Then Covid hit – and Dan was confined to an isolation room.

“If I got Covid, game over,” he says. “I focused on staying alive and playing Fifa and Call of Duty.”

Doctors told Dan his best chance of survival was a stem cell transplant to replace his poorly cells with healthy ones. 

So they contacted a charity called Anthony Nolan which runs a stem cell register and has made nearly 26,500 transplants happen worldwide since 1974. 

“I was lucky,” Dan says. “A 25-year-old German woman was a perfect match.” 

The transplant took place on June 25, 2020 – Dan’s 28th birthday.

“The best gift ever – a chance of life. It took an hour and a half as donor stem cells, which look like orange blood, were pumped inside me,” he remembers.

The transplant was a success. Dan’s donated stem cells did their job, producing red and white blood cells. Four years on, Dan is married to Ruchel and working full time.

But, a year after his transplant, he developed chronic graft-versus-host disease. This means some of the donated cells think the cells in Dan’s eyes, mouth, gut, skin and lungs are foreign – so they’re attacking them. 

With impaired lung function and chronic fatigue, Dan’s sporting days were over.

“The loss of the old me was like grief – an Anthony Nolan-funded psychologist helped me through,” Dan says. 

“It could be a lot worse – I could be dead! Now I appreciate simple pleasures. A takeaway and film with Ruchel and walking our cavapoo, Sirius – amazing. 

“In the pub with the boys watching Man United beat Man City in the cup final – really amazing!”

Dan volunteers for Anthony Nolan as an online community champion, and on stands informing the public about the charity’s work. 

“I wouldn’t be here if a woman in Germany hadn’t said yes when someone asked her to sign up to the stem cell register,” he tells potential donors. “By signing up, you could save a life too.”