Marrow Transplant

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.

When the Rev. Bert Benz counsels dying people, there's one thing they can't say.They can't tell him he doesn't understand. Because the 47-year-old Baptist minister is dying, too.Last August, the pastor of Hampstead's Faith Baptist Church was diagnosed with a rare cancer called chronic myelogenous leukemia.Without a bone marrow transplant, he likely won't live more than threeto five years, Benz says. His chances of finding a public donor are 1 in 20,000. If he finds a donor, there's a 25 percent chance that the operation would be successful.

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.

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."

The Rev. Bert Benz, who has preached and counseled people for 25 years, was now on the receiving end of spiritual advice from a parishioner who called to say that if he would just ask in Jesus' name, those teeming white blood cells of his leukemia would subside.Benz argued gently that he had, indeed, prayed for healing. But "God can also use my life sometimes in the midst of illness," he told his anxious caller, a parishioner at his Faith Baptist Church in Hampstead in Carroll County. "We like to think life is going to be hunky-dory as Christians.

Judy Marsh, the Pasadena woman fighting Blue Cross/Blue Shield to pay for a bone marrow transplant that could rid her body of cancer, could receive a decision today.Marsh's medical records were faxed from North Carolina -- where she is scheduled to undergo the procedure -- to Washington last night.They will be reviewed by officials in the Office of Personnel Management, which sets coverage guidelines for people covered under BC/BS's federal benefit package.Meanwhile, Marsh, who lives in the 7900 block of East Shore Road, has talked to a lawyer and said she will file a lawsuit if she is turned down again.

Allison Atlas of Bethesda, the 20-year-old woman whose search for a bone marrow donor attracted national attention, was discharged late Thursday from a Seattle cancer center after physicians pronounced her in good health.Doctors at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center said they had saw no evidence that her leukemia had returned. Also, they found that the bone marrow donated by her mother, Arline Atlas, had grafted properly despite the fact that it was not a perfect match.A good graft is one that produces normal amounts of red and white blood cells, as a healthy person's marrow would.