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Show Brent begins last-chance , cancer treatment in Seattle by JANICE PERRY Record editor Five-year-old Brent Bloomenthal has undergone two days of chemotherapy and has begun a seven-day series of intense irradia-' tion as the first steps in his latest battle against cancer. ' The Park City kindergartener ' Monday was checked into a 10th-floor 10th-floor room in Swedish Hospital Medical Center, an adjunct facility of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Hospital in Seattle. There, he is undergoing his last-chance last-chance treatment in his fight against neuroblastoma, a form of children's cancer that arises from nervous tissue. The outcome of the treatment is by no means certain. Doctors estimate the bone-marrow transplant he will undergo has a 40 percent chance of success odds that are at best a guess, because the application of the treatment to Brent's form of cancer still is experimental. The boy's presence in the Seattle research hospital is, itself, a success story. Two months ago, the treatment treat-ment seemed a remote possibility. The boy's parents, Phil and Jeannie Bloomenthal, had no health , insurance in-surance and tens of thousands of, dollars in medical bills. Hutchinson required $100,000 be posted before the procedure could begin. , r A relative pledged half that amount and Parkites joined forces to raise the other half. In less than six weeks, the Believers in Brent fund topped $50,000. State health officials, who at first balked at giving Medicaid , assistance to the family, acquiesced because of the intense community contribution. Brent has undergone two days of intensive chemotherapy and at the end of his seven-day total body irradiation, ir-radiation, all of his own bone marrow mar-row (and the cancer with it, doctors hope) will be dead. Brent's half-brother, Ron, will be the bone-marrow donor. The marrow, mar-row, which Hutchinson spokesman Emmit Glanz described as being like "thick tomato soup," will be infused in-fused into Brent's blood intravenously. intravenous-ly. Then, the waiting begins. A new graft takes about 10 days to three weeks to begin to grow. But while Brent waits for the marrow to grow, he will have no immune function, leaving him susceptible to infection. Bone marrow produces infection-fighting infection-fighting blood components. About half of the bone-marrow transplant patientstare selected on a random basis for placement in ' laminar-air-flow rooms to prevent or fight infection, Glanz said. "Patients are not selected ' for ! laminar-air-flow rooms for any particular par-ticular reason. They are not in better ' or worse condition, not stronger or weaker," Glanz said. The patients merely are observed in the LAF environment en-vironment and their progress is compared to that of bone-marrow recipients who are not similarly protected. pro-tected. i! f! Glanz said it had not yet been determined whether Brent will be . placed in one of Hutchinson's 29 such rooms. Brent suffered one complication while waiting for the transplant. His Hickman catheter a tube inserted through his chest and into an artery to carry chemical agents during treatment loosened and infection got in. He was hospitalized Dec. 14 with a high fever. He was treated with antibiotics and a new catheter was inserted Dec. 16. "He's had no further problems," Glanz said. When intravenous drugs are given 1 during chemotherapy, the chemical agents are injected through a rubberized rub-berized plate that is the major, feature of the Hickman catheter, sparing the patient trauma to various veins. Barring complications, a patient usually is discharged to outpatient care between 30 to 40 days post-transplant. post-transplant. A patient normally is required re-quired to remain in Seattle for 90 to 100 days after the procedure. It generally takes a minimum of j six to nine months for the immune system to become fully normal. Dur- ( ing this period, it is not recommend- , ed that patients return to work or school due to risk of infection. A major complication of bone-marrow bone-marrow transplants is graft-versus-host disease, which occurs in about half of transplant patients. The disease involves the donor cells creating antibodies to fight against the "foreign" body of the patient who receives them. 11 In traditional organ transplants it is the patient or host that tries to.re-ject to.re-ject the foreign body. '!"' There also is a risk of a non-! successful graft or graft failure and a relapse of the patient's cancer. |
