After months of searching, Marcia Williams has found the help that might save her life.

Doctors have finally located a promising match of umbilical-cord blood for the wife of midfielder Andy Williams, who has been fighting a rare form of leukemia with which she was diagnosed last year. Though it's not quite a perfect match — it comes from a donor in Spain — it's good enough that Williams will receive the blood in a transplant at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle around June 12, after another round of chemotherapy and radiation treatment there next week.

“We're all happy right now,” Williams said.

Williams will leave the team Thursday and probably miss the next couple of games while he takes his two daughters to Seattle to visit their mother before the procedure, which Williams said is more like a blood transfusion than a surgical transplant. Doctors hope that the stem cells in the transplanted blood grow into new cells that ultimately kill the cancerous ones.

The treatment is still fairly new, Williams said, so there are no long-term studies available on its success rate. But “in short term, it has been great so far,” he said. The family is not in the clear yet, however; Marcia Williams will need to spend 60 to 90 days in the hospital after the transplant, with few visitors, to monitor her recovery and avoid the risk of infection.