# 119 Tuesday, April 4, 2006  -  BLOOD IN, BLOOD OUT: HOPING FOR HELP FROM
ADULT STEM CELLS


"Her white count is zero," said my brother-in-law Chris Gregory on the
telephone yesterday.

When he and my sister Barbara married, she was the picture of health. A
fitness instructor, she lived right, ate right, exercised hard, no smoking,
no drinking, etc.

The image of her walking down the aisle with beaming husband Chris is one I
can call up in my mind without the slightest difficulty- click-there she is,
radiant, joyful, strong.

Six months later, the cancer struck.

Barb asked me not to reveal what kind of cancer it was, so I won't.

But she had the operations immediately to try to remove the source of the
devastation.

It didn't work.

She had massive chemotherapy, the most aggressive doses that could be had-"Basically,
you bring the body as close to death as you can without actually dying, try
to wipe out the cancer"-that did not work either. All it did was make her
terrifyingly sick.

She developed a heart condition, and had to have stents put into her heart,
little tubes to help the blood flow more easily. At one point she was hooked
up to a heart-help machine bigger than she was, and it was on wheels; when
she got out of bed to go to the bathroom, the machine went with her.

She developed leukemia, probably from the chemotherapy.

So now she has cancer, which killed our mother so young, age 55-and
leukemia, which murdered our sister Patty at 23.

Barb was in and out of the City of Hope, probably the most advanced
cancer-fighting institute in the world, in Duarte, California. Fortunately
she had magnificent insurance, or they would have been wiped out financially
long ago.

Bone marrow transfer was an option, at first, but I was not a match, and
brother Dave's leg bones are all messed up, due to a motorcycle accident
years ago.

So-adult stem cells. You know how I feel about adult stem cells: roughly the
way I feel about chemotherapy. It isn't much, but it is all we have
available right now.

Where would the research be today, if President Bill Clinton had been
allowed to go forward with it, as he wanted to do?
People say Bush authorized the first funding of embryonic stem cell
research. False. Clinton authorized it first; it was not allowed, and he had
to withdraw his request.

There were too many of those gentle kind religious conservatives in office,
and the President was told:

He could either give up on the idea of funding embryonic stem cell
research-or lose the entire National Institutes of Health.

And that is why embryonic stem cell research was not funded when it was
first discovered, even though the science and medical communities knew it
was important.

An advancement of medicine was denied for political reasons, just like
narrow-minded conservatives are trying to do now, hoping to criminalize SCNT
and chimeric research, to shut them down before we even get the chance to
find out their true power.

The way I see it, my sister is fighting for her life with second-best
therapies.

She is not backing down. However limited the weapons are at hand, Barbara
will fight.

She endured more chemo, also arsenic, poisoning the system's defenses so
they would not reject whatever help could be had from the adult stem cells.

Then, the adult stem cells had to be obtained. That was where my brother
came in.

They only needed about 50 cc.

Getting that quantity from embryonic stem cells would not be difficult, I am
told; gallons could be made. Embryonic cells multiply like rabbits.

 But adult stem cells are rare in the system, and if they multiply at all,
it is slowly, and with difficulty, like (excuse the crudeness) century-mark
senior citizens having sex. The process is possible, but easier for
embryonic stem cells, which multiply with enthusiasm, like newlyweds, who
wish the wedding guests would hurry up and leave, so the more private
festivities can begin.

To get enough adult stem cells, (blood cells, haematopoietic stem cells) the
doctors would need to take pretty much every drop of blood from the donor's
body.

My younger brother David flew down to the City of Hope, in Duarte,
California.

But it should not be him, giving the stem cells. It should be me! I had
given blood to Barb before, we were a match,"O positive"-she even said she
liked having my blood, said it gave her energy-but I was not a close enough
match for stem cells, or bone marrow.


Dave had a motor cycle accident years ago. A truck forced him off a cliff at
night, he flew through the air, ending up with one leg across the branch of
a tree-and the motorcycle fell across that leg.

 I remember standing by his bed while he struggled with the decision: to
keep the leg, or not. Amputation would be easy, the doctors said. Keeping
the limb would mean a horrific series of operations, removing the fragments
of bone, coring them out like letter O's,  putting the circles around a rod
of stainless steel. This would be put into his leg-and later, when the bones
grew back together-- the metal would have to be removed.

Dave went for it.

So much bone was lost in the process that his leg was several inches
shorter, and he had to have a special shoe made.

But he kept the leg, and he walks with it.

Not to mention he also survived a major heart attack.

We should not be messing with him.

But Dave has notions about how a brother is supposed to be.

Large needles like spikes went into both his arms. He made a little joke
that he was a two-fisted blood donor. They hooked him up to the machines,
looking like one of those electric shock torture machines in the spy movies-"Tell
me your grandmother's cookie recipe!" "Never!"-buzzzzz!

The blood began to run out of one of his arms, and into the machine.

After filtering out the adult cells, the rest of the blood would be put back
into David, through the other arm. (They would add an anti-coagulant so it
would not clot.)

It was a slow process.

A continuous cycle, blood in, blood out, as the gangsters say, referring to
their initiation: beaten up to get into the gang, beaten up worse (or
killed) if you ever wanted to leave.

Dave was on the machines five hours. He was exhausted when they took him
off, having had the blood taken out of his body and put back. He knew he
would have to stay a couple days, eating much and resting more, before it
was safe to fly home.

But it was not over. Even after five hours, there were not enough adult stem
cells, they had only gotten 19 cc.

We'll do it again tomorrow, they said.

And the next day, they put my brother back on the machines, this time for
six hours.

27 cc, with 19 from the day before-46 cubic centimeters-close enough.

How bad was the pain, I asked him afterward.

"A lot less than I expected," he said afterwards, and changed the subject,
babbling away about something else, the old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies
we both enjoy.

People think I talk a lot? I am Silent Sam beside my brother. When he calls,
I contribute to the conversation primarily with "uh-huh" and an occasional
"really?" by way of variety. Dave is like a shot of coffee in the morning;
you might be down and gloomy when you first pick up the phone, but a few
moments of Dave will perk you right up.

I was so proud of him.

So the 46 cc of stem cells were put into Barbara's arm.

"It looked like raspberry juice," said Chris.

"No, you can't talk to her now," he said, as protective a husband to Barb as
Dave is as her brother, "The doctor says she has to nap a lot, maybe as much
as 20 hours a day."

It would be fine if I wanted to come down and give blood, said Chris, but I
probably would not be able to see her. Even he had to wear a mask and
gloves. Nobody who even thought they might be coming down with a cold could
come near her.

Her white blood count was zero: she had no way fight off infection, even
minor ones, like a common cold.

Now we could only wait: hoping the primitive stem cell therapies available
to us now would do some good.  It will take probably three weeks before we
know if they help.

And people wonder why I get so riled up about Washington (or Sacramento) and
their endless ignorance-based restrictions and delays of stem cell research?

"It's just politics," they tell me.

Just politics.

And people's lives.

 By Don Reed, www.stemcellbattles.com           Submit Comments or Questions

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