A stem-cell transplant that had seemed to be successful has failed for former Emporian Lisa Spillman Mesa.
Mesa died Saturday at her home in Broken Arrow, Okla., of complications from graft vs. host disease caused when her body reacted to the donated stem cells. The procedure was the only hope for the 32-year-old, who was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia less than two months after giving birth to her second son, Logan, in August 2008.
Doctors performed the stem-cell transplant on Feb. 12 at Baylor University Hospital in Dallas, after a donor was found through an international bone-marrow donor registry.
The hunt for a compatible donor narrowed down possibilities to only four people on the international registry; only one of them was able to come to the United States to donate the needed cells.
Mesa’s plight prompted her former employer, Greg Bachman of Emporia Physical Therapy and Emporia Fitness, to hold a campaign to register Emporia-area residents for the National Marrow Donor Program in March. The drive was not to find a donor for Lisa Mesa, but to encourage people to register as potential donors for others trapped in similar situations.
“We’re not doing this for Lisa,” Bachman said at the time. “We’re doing it in honor of her.”
Mesa worked for Bachman both in Emporia and at the company’s location in Liberal.
Always athletic and fit, Mesa became Liberal’s representative for three years in the annual Pancake Day Race, which pitted Liberal residents against Olney, England residents to see which city’s representative was fastest in racing a defined distance and flipping a pancake three times during the race without dropping it.
Mesa won the race three times and, until this year, held the record.
Mesa was optimistic about the transplant’s potential to cure her and initially responded well to the procedure, which was performed after she had undergone chemotherapy to improve her chances of recovery.
The leukemia pounced on Mesa within weeks of Logan’s birth when she began to feel tired and weak. She rationalized away her symptoms for a short time and attributed them to the stress of the pregnancy-and-birth cycle and Logan’s need for surgery when he was 3 weeks old.
“So it’s things that are everyday sort of things that you don’t really think about,” Mesa said of her symptoms during an interview earlier this year. “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.’”
She did go to a doctor, however, because she thought she had been bitten by a brown recluse spider. She was planning to come to Emporia for a visit and wanted to have the bite treated first.
“Come to find out that wasn’t a spider bite, that was a leukemia lesion,” she said in the earlier interview. “Basically, it was a sore that had formed and I could not heal it because I had no form of defense. … I wasn’t producing white cells.”
She had, instead, only “blast” cells that do not mature into adult cells.
Mesa responded well initially and, faster than doctors had predicted, she was released from the hospital to stay in an apartment near the hospital, where she went daily for checkups and medication monitoring.
“The doctors are amazed that I’m doing so well and surprised that I’m not on any more medication than I am,” she said at the time.
Mesa’s body began rejecting the stem cells last month. She was hospitalized and recently returned to Broken Arrow after it became evident she would not recover.
She was the daughter of Judy Spillman Welch and the late Glen Spillman and the granddaughter of Beulah Spillman and Opal Dicus, all of Emporia.
emporialifer (anonymous) says...
It's hard to put into words what a person feels upon reading about the loss of such a young promising life. My thoughts and prayers are with Lisa's family during this difficult time.
May 18, 2009 at 3:44 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )