Ryan,

Your email about the genetic information for Noah and I is breathtaking–I couldn’t understand most of it, but I can see the amount of time and thought many very intelligent minds went into thinking about our case.

There are not words to describe how grateful I am–

I also had a very strange thing happen today–out of nowhere on 23 and Me, I got a new genetic match, someone who the DNA says is a second cousin.

This new second cousin, Jennifer, sent me a message, because she’s also having strange health problems, which is why she sent her dna to 23 and Me, so she wants to talk to me because we’re a fairly close match.

(She was put up for adoption so she has no idea who her family is….which is making me wonder if she’s the person my father said called him years ago–)

If we are second cousins, then it looks like we share a great grandparent, meaning that she could be related to a sibling of Donald Mackay (my grandfather who had strange health problems). I know he had 4 or five siblings. One died in childhood from pneumonia, the other died young fighting in WW2, but two others I think made it into adulthood–

23 and Me shows a color graph of where the DNA is that we share–this graph isn’t exact, but if you think the link is close to where our deletion is, I can ask her for her raw data as well.

We haven’t spoken yet (I just responded to her note to me!), so I don’t know if our strange health symptoms match,

but I can’t help but wonder if she’s going to 23 and Me to find answers to her strange health problems, obviously regular medicine can’t figure her out either…

I don’t know if this graph even relates at all to me, but if you think it might, I will ask her to send me her raw data–I think my maternal grandmother had some strange health problems as well (autoimmune Scandinavian problems, mostly with joint problems), but they were fairly minor and never totally disabling, like the ones I inherited from my father–

Thanks again for everything–You’ve given me hope many times over the years when I’ve so badly wanted to give up.

I don’t know how I could ever say thank you enough.

Love,
Tara

(This is the graph from 23 and Me–the purple is approximately where Jennifer and I have genes in common–)