Word: marrows
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...medical team then rushed the marrow to a hospital room where Marissa's 19-year-old sister Anissa lay waiting. Through a Hickman catheter inserted in the chest, the doctor began feeding the baby's marrow into Anissa's veins. The marrow needed only to be dripped into the girl's bloodstream. There, like salmon heading home to spawn, the healthy marrow cells began to find their way to the bones...
Done. If all goes well, if rejection does not occur or a major infection set in, the marrow will do the grail's work. It will give life to the older sister, who otherwise would have died of chronic myelogenous leukemia. Doctors rate the chance of success...
...Ayala family had launched itself upon a sequence of nervy, life-or-death adventures to arrive at that denouement last week. Anissa's leukemia was diagnosed three years ago. In such cases, the patient usually dies within five years unless she receives a marrow transplant. Abe and Mary Ayala, who own a speedometer-repair business, began a nationwide search for a donor whose marrow would be a close match for Anissa's. The search, surrounded by much poignant publicity, failed...
...Ayalas did not passively accept their daughter's fate. They knew from their doctors that the best hope for Anissa lay in a marrow transplant from a sibling, but the marrow of her only brother, Airon, was incompatible. Her life, it seemed, could depend on a sibling who did not yet exist...
...brave, surreal gamble. First, Abe had to have his vasectomy surgically reversed, a procedure with a success rate of just 40%. That done, Mary Ayala ventured to become pregnant at the age of 43. The odds were 1 in 4 that the baby's bone marrow would match her sister's. The Ayalas won that gamble too. In April 1990 Mary bore a daughter, Marissa. Fetal stem cells were extracted from the umbilical cord and frozen for use along with the marrow in last week's transplant. Then everyone waited for the optimum moment -- the baby had to grow...