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Aplastic Anemia News - Return to News Menu
Shattering a stereotype
By Adrian Walker, Globe Columnist
August 11, 2005 - When people think of law firms -- the kind that employs hundreds of lawyers and often represents big corporations -- certain stereotypes come to mind. Words like cold, greedy, and heartless capture the essence of most of them.
As a first-year associate at Ropes & Gray, just seven months into working at the firm, Dan Adams probably hadn't given a lot of thought to changing his profession's image. He was too immersed in the life-consuming schedule of a young lawyer.
All of that would change one morning in April, when he went to work feeling a little under the weather.
It was a Friday, and he felt as if he might have caught a late-winter flu. Over the weekend, he got sicker and sicker.
''Monday I went to work," he said recently. ''I felt a bit better, but still wasn't feeling up to par. Later in the day I started to feel worse. I coughed up some blood. When I blew my nose there was some blood involved."
He went home, rested, and returned to the office the next day. He'd planned to see a doctor, then decided not to bother. That was before he discovered that his boss's secretary, Patti Rapozo, had made a doctor's appointment for him. She told him he looked like crap.
His flu turned out to be something entirely different. His red and white blood cells and platelets were all low. After several days of intense testing, he was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a potentially fatal bone marrow disorder attacking his immune system.
It's a rare disease afflicting only 700 Americans a year. The cause is unknown. There are some suspicions that it could be genetic or that it might be caused by a virus contracted earlier in life that somehow mutated.
One of the few courses of treatment is a bone marrow transplant. Adams's four siblings were tested, but none of them was a match. There is a National Bone Marrow Registry: Of the 7.7 million people on it, only one appeared to be a possible match for him.
For Adams, the bad news was tempered by a pleasant surprise. His colleagues, many of whom barely knew him, immediately rallied around him. In one day, some 217 employees in the firm's International Place office were tested to see if they might be potential bone marrow donors. Two of them turned out to be potential matches, not for Adams, but for other people searching for matches. The firm kicked in approximately $10,000 to pay for the testing.
Like most people who have never needed it, Adams had never given any thought to bone marrow or transplants. He's embarrassed by that now. ''It's quite a simple process with such huge returns," he said recently. ''A simple little test can allow someone to have a bone marrow transplant and save their lives."
When he and I spoke a few days ago, it was by telephone. He has not had a transplant, and immune-system deficiencies caused by his illness don't allow him to be around people very much. He slips into the office on weekends, he says, mostly because he finds it therapeutic.
''I try to do as much as possible, just to keep my mind sharp, but a lack of concentration makes me pretty inefficient," he said.
Adams is now undergoing oral chemotherapy. If that course of treatment fails, then he would need a transplant, though the potential donor will have to undergo extensive additional testing to determine whether they actually match. Adams is optimistic, but not yet in the clear.
Alan Beagan, director of operations at the firm, was among those who knew nothing about Adams's illness until he was called on to help. ''It seemed like there was an invisible force making something happen," he said yesterday. ''We're a family and community, and people just wanted to do the right thing."
If his current course of chemotherapy is successful, Adams could be back at work by mid-September, though a bone marrow transplant remains a possibility.
''It amazed me that Ropes & Gray rallied around me," he said. ''It made me completely proud."
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com
Taichung hospital to perform cord-blood transplant on Sudanese boy
A surgical team at China Medical University (CMU) Hospital in central Taiwan is preparing to perform an umbilical cord blood transplant operation on a Sudanese boy with an immune system genetic disorder that is threatening his young life.
Four-year-old Anuur is scheduled to arrive in Taiwan in early August in the company of his parents to receive the operation at CMU Hospital for aplastic anemia, a genetic disease which claimed his older brother's life when he was just six-and-a-half years old.
Anuur's trip to Taiwan has been made possible by the strenuous efforts of Taichung resident Tsai Yi-man, who is married to a Sudanese man. She heard about Anuur's situation when she visited her husband's country in June.
After learning that Anuur is racing against time and has no chance of receiving a cord-blood transplant anywhere in Sudan, Tsai contacted CMU Hospital to inquire about the possibility of performing the transplant there. She also raised money to buy round-trip plane tickets between Sudan and Taiwan for Anuur and his parents.
In a display of generosity, CMU Hospital not only agreed to make relevant arrangements for the life-saving transplant, it also arranged dorm accommodations near the hospital for Anuur and his parents and asked a local mosque in Taichung to offer assistance to the Sudanese family during their stay in Taiwan.
Meanwhile, the hospital is also looking for volunteers who speak Arabic to serve as "bridges" between the Sudanese family and the CMU medical team.
According to CMU Hospital officials, it will take at least four months from the date of surgery for the team to determine whether the transplant was successful. This means that Anuur will stay at the Taichung hospital for at least four months after the operation.
Umbilical cord blood from a Taiwan donor doesn't require the extremely close tissue-type matching of bone marrow transplants, and rejection of placental cells is less severe, according to CMU Hospital surgeons.
If the transplant is successful, the stem cells from the cord blood will survive in Anuur's bone marrow and produce healthy white blood cells so that the boy can lead a long and healthy life, they said.
Source:Taiwan News(2006/07/27 14:10:39)
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