By Jennifer Moody
For the Gazette-Times | Posted: Thursday, April 26, 2007 12:00 am
ALBANY - Every April, Patrick Williams of Albany gives thanks for another year of health and for the woman who made it possible.
Williams, 35, received a bone marrow transplant at age 15 to combat a blood disorder called aplastic anemia. He was just the second person to receive such a transplant through the Portland Red Cross, which at the time was one of the leaders in marrow transplant programs using donors unrelated to the recipients.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of that transplant, which he received from a once-anonymous donor.
Now a math teacher and junior varsity basketball coach at West Albany High School, Williams has no lingering effects from the illness that nearly cost him his life.
He keeps in contact with his donor, Marci Henderson, now the executive director the American Red Cross in Syracuse, N.Y. He and his family, and his parents, Charlie and Linda Williams of Corvallis, go out to dinner each year to celebrate his recovery.
He thinks "about how lucky (he is) to have had the last 20 years, to graduate from high school, go to college, get married, have a couple of kids."
By family accounts, Williams was an active, athletic and relatively healthy child growing up in Lebanon.
But he remembers playing baseball in the summer before high school, when his scabs just never seemed to heal. He remembers the tiny blood vessels that would burst in his arms when he lifted weights. Each day during the first part of his sophomore year, he was too tired to do anything but come straight home from school and take a nap.
Neither he nor his family realized he was sick until his sophomore year, when a P.E. teacher at Lebanon High School noticed his once-energetic student suddenly couldn't run a lap anymore.
That was in October 1986. His parents took him to a doctor, who took a blood test.
"After they looked at it for a little while, they just couldn't believe I was still walking around," Williams said.
The doctor immediately sent him to Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis. Tests determined he had aplastic anemia, a condition in which bone marrow doesn't produce enough new red or white blood cells and platelets.
Untreated, the condition is fatal. So the day after receiving the diagnosis, the Williams family headed to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where Williams' parents and little brother and sister were evaluated as possible marrow transplant candidates. Nobody matched.
According to the National Marrow Donor Program, aplastic anemia patients who receive marrow from an unrelated donor have a survival rate of 56 to 73 percent. The higher numbers belong to patients under the age of 20 who receive a transplant within a year of diagnosis.
At the time, however, unrelated donor marrow programs were just getting started. The Portland Red Cross was one of the first to have a list of potential donors. Henderson, then 27 and working for the Portland Red Cross, had decided the year before to add her name to the list.
The hospital sent the family home with medicine meant to kick-start Williams' own marrow into producing more cells while waiting for a donor.
It didn't work. He continued to get worse. He began receiving blood transfusions to keep the cell count up.
"Initially, Pat was receiving transfusions every couple of weeks, but as time passed was requiring them weekly and then almost daily, especially the platelets," remembered his father, Charlie Williams.
"At one point just before his transplant, the platelets had to be flown in from California to the hospital in Corvallis and arrived in the middle of the night just in time."
Had a donor not been found, Williams figures he probably would have died within a month of his last transfusion.
Somehow, though, the thought never seemed real; the experience seemed like more an inconvenience than life-threatening.
"I remember telling my parents, 'This is kind of eating up a lot of my high school,'" he said, laughing. "I just wanted to get through it."
Henderson was studying for a master's in business administration at Oregon State University when a friend from the Portland Red Cross told her she was a potential match for a marrow transplant. She remembers her excitement.
"I felt from the beginning it would be a match," she said by phone from New York, "and I knew if it was a match it was going to work. There was just was no doubt in my mind."
Neither Henderson nor Williams knew anything about each other, only that a donor had been found for a transplant.
Henderson was put under general anesthesia and had her marrow drawn out with a long needle at eight points around her hip bone. She was in the hospital for three days recovering.
Williams spent about a month after the procedure in a sanitized "bubble room," where visitors had to change clothes before entering.
Williams recovered rapidly and had no complications, although the transplant changed his blood type from O-positive to B-positive and appears to have cured his childhood asthma.
Tutoring during his illness helped keep his education on track, and by his senior year he was valedictorian and on the tennis team.
When graduation approached, in 1989, he sent an invitation to his donor via the cancer center, the same way he had sent other updates on his condition.
He didn't know it, but when he made his valedictory speech, thanking his unknown donor, Henderson was in the audience, listening. Henderson knew Williams' story through updates from the Portland Red Cross newsletter and had decided to attend his ceremony anonymously.
"After enough years go by, the two parties can decide when they want to meet each other and we had both talked about it," said Patrick's mother, Linda Williams. "Then when we sent her a wedding invitation (for July 10, 1999), she called. She asked if we were ready to meet her and we said 'yes!'"
Henderson and the Williams family met for lunch in Corvallis. It was a wonderful experience, Henderson said. The wedding was "great cause for celebration anyway; in this circumstance it was just a little bit more special."
It was a wonderful moment, but awkward, Williams recalled. "What do you say? It's just such an amazing gift, to be so selfless."
Williams said he often thinks about his own life - his job, his wife, Emily, and their children, Luke, 3, and Katherine, 6 months - and what he would have missed without that donation.
"It just makes me feel so lucky to have had the memories and experiences I've had in the last 20 years," he said. "It's so easy to get stuck in not appreciating every day for what it is."
Want to Donate?
What is the National Marrow Donor Program?
The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) is a non-profit organization that makes it possible for patients suffering from life-threatening diseases to receive transplants from matching registered donors. By maintaining a diverse registry of potential, volunteer bone marrow and stem cell donors, the NMDP provides a means of finding the right donor for the treatment of critically ill patients across the United States.
To join the registry
Please contact the American Red Cross at:
The National Marrow Donor Program
Oregon/SW Washington Office
3131 N. Vancouver Ave.
Portland, Oregon 97227
Telephone: 1-888-298-6722
On the Net
To learn more about bone marrow donation, please visit the National Marrow Donor Program Web site: www.marrow.org