The odds were rated at several million to one, but Linda Wells - the adoptive mother of six-year-old Kailee who is dying of leukaemia - may have just achieved the near-impossible dream.
She returned to the mainland last week in a final attempt to save her daughter's life by finding a compatible bone marrow donor - and now doctors have told her they have found a perfect match.
'I just can't believe it; it's too good to be true,' the 51-year-old American said yesterday. 'I'm simply ecstatic.'
The Tianjin doctors finally found the match in the umbilical cord of a baby born one year ago. The cord had been frozen in a hospital.
But although three blood experts have already said it was a perfect match, she said final confirmation would not come until today, when she goes to Tianjin, where the donor was found.
'I'm so excited but also very afraid that it might turn out not to be a match,' she said. 'But at this stage all the indications are that it really is a perfect match.'
Kailee, who suffers from severe aplastic anaemia, has been kept alive by chemotherapy, steroids and a radical cocktail of drugs. Several months ago her doctors said she would only live a matter of weeks if a suitable donor was not found.
