Marrow Transplant

When two of the great singers of our time, Jose Carreras and Marilyn Horne, sing together tonight at Wolf Trap for the benefit of leukemia-related foundations, the extraordinary concert will have personal significance for me. Twenty-five years ago I was one of the first leukemia marrow-transplant donors.Both singers have volunteered for personal reasons. Miss Horne's father died of leukemia. A marrow transplant in 1987 enabled Mr. Carreras to survive acute lymphoblastic leukemia. A quarter-century ago when my sister contracted this same leukemia, it was a quick death sentence.

Good Morning America's Robin Roberts returned to the anchor desk this morning, five months after taking temporary leave for a bone marrow transplant. Her welcome back included a video message from President Obama. "I keep pinching myself and I realize this is real," Roberts said about her return. Roberts had to get the transplant after doctors diagnosed her with the rare condition myelodysplastic syndromes, or MDS. MDS is a group of disorders that cause the bone marrow to produce an inadequate number of helathy red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets.

Judy Marsh is coming home.Fifty-two days after the Pasadena resident entered the isolation ward at the Duke University Cancer Center in North Carolina, she will finally be able to sleep in her own bed in her own home on East Shore Drive.Marsh was in Durham to undergo a controversial treatment for breast cancer -- a procedure her insurance company calls an experimental,but one her doctors say may be her only chance at survival.The procedure, called an autologous bone marrow transplant, removed and froze some of her bone marrow at the same time intense chemotherapy -- several weeks worth in just a few days -- was administered.

Mia Loizeaux, whose four-year struggle with a rare form of cancer shaped her determination to become an oncology nurse and help others similarly afflicted, died Thursday of the disease at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Canton resident was 31. The daughter of a businessman and a homemaker, Mia Loizeaux was born in Baltimore and raised in Phoenix, in Baltimore County. Ms. Loizeaux attended the Bryn Mawr School and graduated in 1999 from the McDonogh School, where she had played field hockey and lacrosse.

Good Morning America's Robin Roberts returned to the anchor desk this morning, five months after taking temporary leave for a bone marrow transplant. Her welcome back included a video message from President Obama. "I keep pinching myself and I realize this is real," Roberts said about her return. Roberts had to get the transplant after doctors diagnosed her with the rare condition myelodysplastic syndromes, or MDS. MDS is a group of disorders that cause the bone marrow to produce an inadequate number of helathy red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets.

Jason Talbot, 19, brother of U.S. Olympic speed skater Kristen Talbot, has shown steady progress after the bone marrow transplant from his older sister on Jan. 11 at Johns Hopkins Hospital.Jason Talbot has aplastic anemia, a rare and potentially fatal condition that attacks the bone marrow and slows production of red and white blood cells. According to Jason Talbot, his white blood cell count has risen from 41 to 500 after chemotherapy treatments designed to kill his white blood cells so they would not clash with the transplanted cells.

Friends, neighbors and strangers from across the state have done for Judy Marsh what her insurance company would not -- pay for her cancer treatment.With time running out and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina still reviewing her file, the 49-year-old Pasadena woman with breast cancer said yesterday that enough money has been raised to send her to Durham for treatment."

Mia Loizeaux, whose four-year struggle with a rare form of cancer shaped her determination to become an oncology nurse and help others similarly afflicted, died Thursday of the disease at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Canton resident was 31. The daughter of a businessman and a homemaker, Mia Loizeaux was born in Baltimore and raised in Phoenix, in Baltimore County. Ms. Loizeaux attended the Bryn Mawr School and graduated in 1999 from the McDonogh School, where she had played field hockey and lacrosse.

At about 8 o'clock this morning, doctors at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, Calif., plan to transplant bone marrow into Anissa Ayala, a 19-year-old woman who is dying of leukemia.The marrow will come from her baby sister, Marissa. Their parents say they conceived Marissa to provide bone marrow to save Anissa's life.Doctors and ethicists say this is the first time a family has publicly admitted conceiving a child to serve as an organ donor. But many others have done so privately, conceiving babies to provide bone marrow for siblings and relatives or even, in one case, a kidney.

A federal judge has ruled that Blue Cross-Blue Shield wrongly denied breast cancer treatment to two Maryland women when the insurer claimed that the treatment was "experimental."In a decision filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Judge Marvin J. Garbis said Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Maryland must pay for the therapy, called "high dose chemotherapy with autologous bone marrow transplants," at an estimated cost of $100,000 a patient.The suit was regarded as a test case on the insurability of the therapy, known as HDCT-ABMT, and on the Blues' contention they have the right to deny coverage based on their own determination of the treatment's medical acceptability.

"Good Morning America"  co-host George Stephanopoulos used the adjective "staggering" to describe the response to his on-air partner Robin Roberts' announcement this week that she has a blood disease and needs a bone marrow transplant. In the 24 hours since that announcement on GMA, the number of bone marrow donors rose more than 1,000 percent, ABC News reports. This is a story milllions of viewers will follow closely, and one takeaway from the response this week is a reminder of how deeply many of us come to care about the people we see day in and day out on TV. This seems to be especially true in morning television where there is an ongoing conversation between the hosts and their audience with personal aspects of the TV performers' lives shared.

Good Morning America host Robin Roberts told viewers in an emotional announcement this morning that she has the rare disorder myelodysplastic syndromes. She will soon get a bone marrow transplant from her older sister. It's probably fair to say that many people probably haven't heard of the disease that also goes by MDS. MDS is actually a group of disorders that cause the bone marrow to produce an inadequate number of healthy red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Tania Laguerre, a 34-year-old supervisor at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, heard from her boss about a campaign to get more minorities to volunteer as potential bone marrow donors. So Laguerre, an African-American, used her holiday yesterday to drive to the Park School in Pikesville, where she signed up at an outreach event designed to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "There are a lot of areas where minorities are shortchanged, and if there are any areas where I can help out, that's my goal," said Laguerre as she filled out an application.

A young cancer patient recovering at home from a bone marrow transplant died two weeks ago after receiving an improperly mixed intravenous solution that apparently caused her heart to stop, Johns Hopkins Hospital officials said yesterday. Brianna Cohen was given a solution prepared by the Johns Hopkins Home Care Group that contained nearly five times the prescribed amount of potassium, said Dr. George J. Dover, director of the Hopkins Children's Center. Because an autopsy was not performed, Hopkins cannot say for certain what caused the girl's death Dec. 4. But Richard P. Kidwell, a hospital attorney, said the elevated potassium level probably triggered an irregular heartbeat that caused her heart to stop.

Dr. George W. Santos, founder of the Johns Hopkins bone marrow transplant center, died Sunday of complications from cancer in Arlington Memorial Hospital in Arlington, Texas. He was 72 and lived in Phoenix before he moved to Hilton Head Island, S.C., five years ago. A world-renowned expert in bone marrow transplantation as a life-saving therapy for victims of blood diseases, Dr. Santos was professor emeritus of oncology and medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He was one of the pioneers in the development of the procedure and performed the first bone marrow transplant in 1968.

Kim Brittain has cried plenty over the past few months, but yesterday she wept tears of joy.That's because doctors have scheduled a bone marrow transplant for her 2-year-old son, Austin, after neighbors and strangers rallied to raise $56,000 to pay for the operation. Brittain tearfully thanked everyone who sent money, cards and letters."The response was overwhelming, more than we thought," Brittain said yesterday from her Norrisville home in Harford County. "I just want to let everyone know that Austin is doing well, that he is strong, and that we are so grateful."

"Good Morning America"  co-host George Stephanopoulos used the adjective "staggering" to describe the response to his on-air partner Robin Roberts' announcement this week that she has a blood disease and needs a bone marrow transplant. In the 24 hours since that announcement on GMA, the number of bone marrow donors rose more than 1,000 percent, ABC News reports. This is a story milllions of viewers will follow closely, and one takeaway from the response this week is a reminder of how deeply many of us come to care about the people we see day in and day out on TV. This seems to be especially true in morning television where there is an ongoing conversation between the hosts and their audience with personal aspects of the TV performers' lives shared.

Tania Laguerre, a 34-year-old supervisor at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, heard from her boss about a campaign to get more minorities to volunteer as potential bone marrow donors. So Laguerre, an African-American, used her holiday yesterday to drive to the Park School in Pikesville, where she signed up at an outreach event designed to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "There are a lot of areas where minorities are shortchanged, and if there are any areas where I can help out, that's my goal," said Laguerre as she filled out an application.

SEARCHING FOR A needle in a haystack would be an arduous task, but one any parent would do to save their child.George and Nancy Hladky of Sykesville are searching for that needle in the haystack for their son Gregory.Greg, a 16-year-old junior at South Carroll High School, was stricken with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) in December 1997 and is in need of a bone marrow transplant.The gregarious teen-ager has been fighting the disease and has been in and out of Johns Hopkins Hospital many times over the past 15 months.

A major international study has shown that bone marrow transplants can cure sickle cell disease in some children, a finding that experts say could herald a new era in treating the blood disease.Researchers involved in the study said they had achieved the cure in 16 of 22 patients with advanced disease by replacing the bone marrow that produces the defective red blood cells characteristic of the disease. Two of the children died after undergoing transplants.Sickle cell disease is a family of inherited and previously incurable disorders that afflict several million people around the world.