Teresa Álvarez Núñez was 13 years old when her twin sister, Modesta, started with a persistent fever that did not subside. After several days sick, she was taken to the emergency room in Barcelona, where the family received a devastating diagnosis: acute leukemia. “They gave her blood transfusions, it seemed like she was improving, but it was not enough. She needed a transplant and, because she was a twin, I had the possibility of saving her,” Teresa recalls. Half a century later, the emotion is still in his eyes as he reconstructs a story that marked a before and after in Spanish medicine. In 1976, Teresa and Modesta were involved in the first bone marrow transplant carried out in Spain, a then experimental procedure that today saves thousands of lives each year (more than 3,000 are done annually in Spain). “I wasn’t aware of anything,” says Teresa. “Whether it was the first or the fifth didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t afraid. I just knew that my sister could be saved.”
