Word: patients
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...When the patient is wheeled into the "resus" (resuscitation) room, a fully mobilized team is usually ready and waiting. At a large urban medical center such as U.C. Davis, this may include a physician specializing in emergency medicine, five residents (including an anesthesiologist), three nurses, a respiratory therapist, X-ray and trauma technicians and several aides. While one doctor tries talking to the patient and checks for major injury, another starts drawing blood for tests. Other team members may be inserting catheters, stanching bleeding, administering blood or other fluids. Within five to 15 minutes, the patient...
...emerges a few minutes later in a baggy blue hospital gown and the inevitable plastic bracelet. Suddenly, she looks vulnerable. This morning Majewski is scheduled to undergo a bone-marrow harvest, in which doctors will remove about a quart of her marrow to be transplanted into a young patient dying of leukemia. She has never met the patient, who lives in Europe. They do not even know each other's names. They have been brought together by a computer search, by the quirk of a few shared genetic traits and, above all, by Majewski's kindness and courage, her willingness...
...recipient, the process begins with massive doses of chemotherapy or radiation, or both, to wipe out the disease. But that treatment kills the patient's bone-marrow cells as well. Without this spongy tissue at the core of many larger bones, a person cannot live. Marrow contains the precious stem cells that produce all the body's 30,000 trillion red blood cells, many of its infection-fighting white cells and the platelets that are essential for clotting...
...patient can begin the drastic treatment that will destroy bone marrow unless it is certain that the marrow can be replaced. Some have autologous transplants, in which their own marrow is harvested and returned to them later; others must search for allogeneic transplants from donors--usually relatives. But even close relatives do not always have compatible marrow. In recent years about two-thirds of all patients needing allogeneic transplants have sought unrelated donors...
...years ago, when a friend asked them to help a family member with leukemia. They underwent initial blood tests, known as HLA typing, for a series of four genetically determined traits that, along with two more traits tested at a second level, must closely match those of the patient for a transplant to be accepted by the body. Neither Teri Majewski nor her husband matched, but they let the American Bone Marrow Donor Registry keep their records...