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# 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn