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Show Bone graft is 'taking7 I Brent may go home soon 1 by JANICE PERRY Record editor Brent Bloomenthal was making dramatic strides in his body's acceptance accep-tance of a bone-marrow transplant and the Park City kindergartener could be discharged from the Seattle cancer research hospital this week, his mother said. The boy underwent the experimental ex-perimental transplant Dec. 4 as a last-hope treatment for his neuroblastoma form of cancer. On the 14th day after the transplant, a sampling of his bone marrow showed a 40 percent engraftment of his half-brother's donated bone marrow, said the boys' mother, Jeannie Bloomenthal. "They (the doctors) said that is very, very, very unusual because in most cases when the patient is doing well at that stage the graft has only taken about 10 percent," she said. And, she said, that sample showed - no cancer in his marrow at that point. "He's having a little bout with graft vs. host disease, but we figure that he'll be out of the hospital here in a couple of days," she said Monday. Mon-day. If he gets out of the hospital, he will stay in Seattle for about two months so doctors at the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center can monitor his condition. Graft vs. host disease occurs in bone-marrow transplant cases when the marrow graft which produces infection-fighting blood componentsactually com-ponentsactually starts to "reject" the recipient's body as foreign. Brent's tissue only matched on four of six points with that of the donor, his half-brother Ron Mathews. So far, Brent has had severe itching it-ching on his palms and soles of his feet and a skin rash, Bloomenthal said. But she noted that it could be much worse. "He is still throwing up a lot and they think it might be G-V-H (graft vs. host) in his intestinal tract," she said. "That's why he can't go home yet," she said. Brent has to be taking half of his caloric intake by mouth before he be discharged from the hospital. In the meantime, the 5-year-old is isolated in a plastic-sheeted room, called a laminar-air-flow room, to protect him from infection. Although Brent probably is safer from the hardened, drug-resistant strains of hospital germs in the LAF room, his mother said it's "kind of a pain" because she has to don gown, mask, booties and gloves to gain entry en-try and "there's always a plastic screen between us." But Brent is in good spirits and, like any 5-year-old, is "mostly looking look-ing forward to Christmas;'? If he still was in the hospital on Christmas Day, his parents planned to put up a little tree in his room after he falls asleep Christmas Eve and "and sneak in and play Santa Claus. " The youngster was able to undergo the transplant procedure after a relative pledged $50,000 toward the $100,000 deposit required by the , research center and the Park City community raised the other half . ; Another major fundraiser was under way for Brent this month, in which employees of a local timeshare firm and the firm itself donated $3,580 and a $9,900 timeshare was donated for auction with benefits going to aid the family ( see related story on this page) . |
