A search that spanned the global registry of the National Marrow Donor Program has turned up a compatible donor for a transplant for former Emporian Lisa Spillman Mesa of Broken Arrow, Okla.
The unidentified female donor will come to the United States for the transplant procedure, which is scheduled to occur next week.
Mesa was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia seven or eight weeks after giving birth to her second child, Logan, in August 2008. She and her husband, Manny, also are parents of a son, Aiden, 2.
The difficulty in finding a donor for Mesa spurred her former boss, Emporian Greg Bachman, to plan a donor-registry drive that, while not of benefit to Mesa, will increase the number of people available who are willing to donate their bone marrow if it proves to be a match for patients who cannot live without it.
Mesa — the daughter of Judy Spillman Welch and the late Glen Spillman, and the granddaughter of Beulah Spillman and Opal Dacus, all of Emporia — worked as an intern for Bachman at Emporia Physical Therapy and Fitness and later worked for Bachman and his partners for several years at a similar operation in Liberal.
“We’re not doing this for Lisa,” Bachman said. “We’re doing it in honor of her.”
The registration is scheduled from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. March 2 at Emporia Fitness, 2812 W. 12th Ave. A representative of the NMDP will be there to assist with the process, which includes filling out paperwork and taking four swab samples from each potential donor’s mouth.
“There’s absolutely no discomfort involved now,” Bachman said.
Any discomfort, and sometimes it is minimal, will come when the procedure begins on Wednesday in Dallas.
Mesa, now 32, already has undergone two extreme doses of chemotherapy and is preparing to leave Saturday to go to Dallas for another round of chemotherapy and a total-body radiation treatment, Welch said.
Mesa was upbeat Tuesday evening as she talked about the upcoming procedure and the months she will need to spend in Dallas while her body adjusts to the donation.
The pre-transplant treatments will lay the groundwork for the actual transplant,
“It will do two things,” Mesa said. “It will wipe out any of the cancer cells that are still there, and then it will also kill away all of my bone marrow. ... My immune system will be all wiped-out again.”
The transplant also will change Mesa’s blood type from her own to that of the donor.
“I am technically going to be having a stem cell transplant,” Mesa said.
That means that instead of drawing out bone marrow from the donor, blood will be drawn and separated into different parts.
“And one of those parts happens to be stem cells,” Mesa said.
The remainder of the blood will be reinjected into the donor.
“For the donor, it’s really not that bad — an IV in each arm,” she said. “One is taking blood, the other is putting blood back in.”
Mesa said she could not use her own processed stem cells for the transplant because she has a chromosomal defect and she carries a rare antigen that makes a donor match even more difficult. None of her close family members was compatible to be a donor.
“I don’t know what I would have done,” Mesa said, talking about what might have happened if a compatible donor had not surfaced. “She’s an international donor and she was the only one. ... thank goodness someone else has (the antigen), too.”
Welch said that a total of four potential matches came from the international registry, after a search of the American list failed to turn up a donor. Two of them by then were unavailable for unknown causes, and apparently only one was willing to come to the United States to help Mesa.
But one is all Mesa needs for the upcoming transplant, and she is optimistic that she’s going into the procedure under the best circumstances possible for the situation.
The initial chemotherapy has not harmed her lungs, liver, heart, and other organs that often suffer from the stress of the chemical poisons.
“It’s a good thing that I am healthy otherwise, which is why this is such a shock,” Mesa said. “I’ve never had anything wrong with me.”
Mesa has always been athletic and in shape. She was a basketball and a track standout in Emporia and was a three-time winner and still record-holder of the fastest time in the annual Pancake Day race between Liberal and Olney, England.
After giving birth to Logan, she often felt fatigued, and attributed it to having just given birth. Logan then began losing weight and had to have surgery at the age of three weeks to open a passageway for food. She told herself that the stress of everything combined had made her feel tired and weak.
“So it’s things that are everyday sort of things that you don’t really think about,” Mesa said of her symptoms. “It’s not, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got a lump here or pain.’ ... There’s none of that. You just don’t feel good. You feel run down, you have no energy, you’re short of breath. So it’s really kind of hard to think, ‘I need to go to a doctor.’”
When she finally went to her doctor, it was because she thought she had been bitten by a brown recluse spider. She was planning to come to Emporia to visit her family and wanted to have the bite treated before she made the drive north.
“Come to find out that wasn’t a spider bite, that was a leukemia lesion,” Mesa said. “Basically, it was a sore that had formed and I couldn’t heal it because I had no form of defense. ... I wasn’t producing white cells.”
Instead, she had only millions and millions of “blast” cells that do not mature into adult cells.
Treatment began quickly, but it has been only recently that all of the conditions were right for Mesa to receive the transplant.
She will be in the hospital for a couple of months, then will need to stay within 30 minutes of the hospital for a time to make sure she can get back quickly should she need treatment.
On Tuesday, she was having mixed emotions about the transplant.
“I’m definitely ready to get it over with, but the thing that’s holding me back a little bit is just my kiddos, being away from my home and my husband,” she said. “If I could do it where I live and not be four hours away from them ....”
Manny Mesa will bring the children to visit on weekends when he doesn’t have to work, and friends will bring them to Dallas when he isn’t available.
If Lisa Mesa’s body does not reject the stem cells, her body should begin making its own new ones and the leukemia plaguing her now should disappear.
And, although neither she nor science know why the leukemia struck, she and her family can’t help speculating that it might be related to her father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
Glen Spillman died of cancer when he was in his 40s.
“I have just heard through the grapevine from several different people, they’re thinking that children of Vietnam Vets that were exposed to Agent Orange are coming up with leukemia at a rate higher than other individuals,” Mesa said. “A lot of his unit (died), too. I don’t know how much truth, how much is behind it.”
If the growing number of cancers with possible ties to Agent Orange continues, the demand for donors to help treat it could grow as well.
Bachman hopes that the registration on March 2 will help expand the availability of donors.
Basic requirements are that a potential donor be:
F In general good health
F between the ages of 18 through 60
F willing to donate to any patient in need
Travel to the hospital, the cost of the procedure and related expenses are paid for by insurance, Welch said, not by the donor.
The cost to register to donate is $52, which the NMDP charges as a processing fee. The local registration has received a community grant from the organization that will reduce the cost to $25 for the donor. Bachman will pay the $25 fee for any employee of Emporia Physical Therapy or Emporia Fitness who enrolls as a donor.
Anyone who wants to donate to a fund to help defray travel and other costs for the Mesa family may send checks to: Lisa Mesa, ARVEST Cares Account, 502 S. Main Mall, Tulsa, OK 74103.
E-mail messages may be sent to her at lisa_mesa@hotmail.com.
madpoet (anonymous) says...
I'm glad they're doing that here. I saw the drive up in Topeka for that little girl. I'll try to remember to go register. A good friend's son had leukemia and I was about to register for his sake when they learned he didn't need it after all. They were lucky but they told me since it's not free, many don't register. I'll try to scrape up the fee somehow.
February 4, 2009 at 3:47 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
hottopics (anonymous) says...
I hope the Gazette puts out a reminder again right before March 2nd.
Does it matter at all about any medications one takes to make them non-eligible to donate?? I know I cant give blood because of my thyroid but that may have changed since I was turned down years ago.
February 4, 2009 at 9:37 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )