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Show Yet another wait begins for Brent after transplant by JANICE PERRY Record editor The moment for which Parkites walked, auctioned, skated, cooked, flew balloons, and donated money finally arrived Wednesday. . . . Brent Bloomenthal had a bone-marrow bone-marrow transplant that might prevent pre-vent cancer from claiming his young ..life.' ... . Starting Monday, Nov. 25, the Park City 5-year-old started undergoing a series of chemotherapy and radiation treatments that weakened and sickened him and, doctors hope, killed kill-ed all of the cancer cells in his body. But those treatments also killed Brent's bone marrow, so the mar- row of his half-brother, Ron Mathews, was infused into Brent's body Wednesday and the wait again began for his parents, Jeannie and Phil Bloomenthal. . But waiting is not new for the family. They waited as Parkites raised more than $50,000 in six weeks to help make the experimental experimen-tal treatment for Brent's form of cancer a reality. Then they waited to find out whether he was a candidate ' " ' f --r - for theprocedure, Then they waited i ' :"r- for a bed to become avIlTabfeaf (fie ' Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research ' "-Hospital. Now they must wait to see whether the engraftment "takes" and whether Ron's bone marrow (which produces infection-fighting blood components) will start to reject Brent's body. In traditional organ transplants, a person's body often will reject the foreign organ through production of antibodies from the bone marrow. But when bone marrow is transplanted into another person, it is the graft itself that can reject its host hence the name, graft-vs.-host disease. "Normally, you have a pretty good idea of engraftment by day 14 (after the procedure)," said Hutchinson Hut-chinson spokesman Emmit Glanz. "They'll know by then if it has taken place." Glanz explained that doctors take bone marrow samples from the hip at seven, 14 and 21 days post-transplant, post-transplant, to see whether the liquid marrow that is transfused into his veins has grafted. Graft-vs.-host disease which oc-- oc-- curs in half of bone-marrow transplant patients "could show up from day 14 on," Glanz said. "But the later it (shows up), the less severe it is." That complication k y . -1 w 1 Brent had transplant Wednesday. Wed-nesday. would be treated with anti-rejection drugs. Brent and his half-brother have a less:than-perfect tissue match, with four of six factors corresponding. The-kindergartener sufforsalrom " neuroblastoma,' a forhlbf children's ' cancer that arises from nervous tissue. In Brent, it has settled in the bones. Chemotherapy treatment failed and the experimental bone-marrow bone-marrow transplant was his only hope. Such transplants are common treatments for leukemia and' aplastic anemia, but only recently have been tried on neuroblastoma sufferers. The procedure only has been done on neuroblastoma patients for about two years. Since three years without recurrence of disease is considered a success, the final outcome of such transplants is less than certain. Doctors Doc-tors say there is a 40 percent chance of success. Hutchinson required $100,000 be posted by the family before the procedure pro-cedure could begin. The family had no medical insurance and a relative pledged half the amount. The Park City ; community raised the rest, through a special weekend of fun-draising fun-draising that involved many of the local businesses and most Parkites, in one form or another. State officials, who earlier balked at providing Medicaid funding for the experimental treatment, agreed to help the family after seeing the intense in-tense community effort to save Brent. |
