Sabrina Chahir was waiting to meet the man who helped send her cancer into remission.

The 8-year-old from Mount Prospect, who likes art and takes piano lessons, knew he had flown across an ocean to see her, nearly four years after he donated his stem cells to help rid her blood of cancer that could have taken her life.

Thursday evening, Sabrina and Maximilian Eule, 30, had their first face-to-face meeting at a celebration in Schaumburg with Sabrina's friends and family.

The two had emailed and video-chatted. But Sabrina's mother, Natalia Wehr, said it was important to her to meet Eule in person.

"It's your daughter, and this person we don't know did something so wonderful," Wehr said. "You need to know who that is."

Sabrina was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, one of the most common types of cancer in children, when she was 2 1/2. The cancer cells were in more than 80 percent of her blood.

The girl's cancer had gone into remission before, but she soon relapsed. After rounds of treatment and infections that caused Sabrina to go blind temporarily, doctors at Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago told Sabrina's family she would need a stem cell transplant.

"It was the most painful thing you can imagine," Wehr said. "Not knowing if your child is going to live or not. It's the worst feeling in the world."

Ten to 15 percent of children diagnosed with this type of leukemia need a stem cell transplant, but the treatment is more common for other types of cancer, said Dr. Reggie Duerst, one of Sabrina's doctors and director of the stem cell transplant program at Lurie.

And while doctors said the best donor matches are often people of similar racial and ethnic backgrounds Sabrina is Hispanic and Arab her match, located through a computer database, turned out to be a German man who lives in Austria.

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Girl meets Austrian stem cell donor who helped her beat cancer