Word: celling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Sanders had been shot running in the upstairs hallway, trying to warn people; he was bleeding badly and needed help fast. But by this time the 911 lines were so flooded with calls that the phone company started disconnecting people--including Starkey. Finally the 911 dispatcher used his personal cell phone and kept a line open to the classroom so he could help guide police there...
...odds were against little Keone Penn from the start. Born with the most severe form of sickle-cell anemia, a hereditary blood disorder that afflicts more than 70,000 Americans, most of them of African descent, he experienced repeated episodes of racking pain and high fever as brittle, sickle-shaped red blood cells clogged his vessels. At age 5, he was temporarily paralyzed by a stroke. Since then he has bravely endured blood transfusions as often as every two weeks via a catheter attached to his chest. Still the threat of devastating pain and life-threatening infections continued to shadow...
...Keone's dream seems about to come true, thanks to a pioneering medical treatment. Exactly a year ago last week, Keone, now 13, became the first sickle-cell patient to receive a transplant of blood cells from the umbilical cord of a newborn infant. In effect, he got a new bloodmaking system. Other young sickle-cell patients have undergone transplants, but these involved bone-marrow cells and had to be matched precisely with the recipients' own blood. In Keone's case, though, his half-sister could not offer matching marrow. So his doctors decided to turn to more easily available...
...Cord-cell transplants have been performed for other blood diseases, such as leukemia, but they remain experimental and highly risky. Dr. Andrew Yeager, a transplant physician at Emory University medical school in Atlanta, warned the Penns that not only might Keone die, but there was not even more than a 50% chance the procedure would do any good. After seven years of blood transfusions that were becoming more and more painful and increasingly ineffective, Keone decided he had no other choice. "Mama, I might die anyway," he told his mother Leslie, a medical technician, who left the decision entirely...
Last week, on the first anniversary of the transplant, Yeager finally felt justified medically in pronouncing Keone cured. "The cord blood cells are now fully operational, making all healthy blood cells in Keone," he says. Equally important, there was no sign of sickle cells and no need for more transfusions. That, of course, was a coup for the doctors, who believe their widely watched experiment could benefit other severely ill sickle-cell kids who can't find matching donors for conventional transplants. Indeed, Yeager believes using umbilical cells could increase the number of successful transplants...