By Cell Therapy Foundation on Jul 05, 2014
GOLTRY, Okla. — An Oklahoma woman is back home after traveling to Milwaukee to give her brother a special birthday present. Jeni Sumner was the only match among family members tested to donate stem cells to her younger brother, who was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia last year.
Ed Dee’s cancer went into remission last October but returned earlier this year. Sumner said Dee’s doctors felt a stem cell transplant would be the best treatment.
The transplant began at 2:07 p.m. Tuesday — Dee’s birthday — and took about an hour, she said. “We had a little birthday party for him and then he got my present,” Sumner said.
Prior to the transplant, Dee went through chemotherapy and had a “conditioning treatment,” which Sumner said entailed the doctors wiping out his immune system and blood levels. Sumner, herself, was given injections over four days to make her bone marrow produce more stem cells and push them into her blood.
“Those went really well,” she said. The stem cell retrieval went perfect. I mean, I gave enough stem cells that I didn’t have to come back the second day." Sumner said a line was put in her right arm to draw the blood out. The blood went through a machine — to separate the stem cells from her blood — before it was returned to her body through another line in her left arm.
From start to finish, the retrieval process took a little more than five hours. “You’re laying in a nice comfortable bed, I had friends and family and everybody there. We watched TV,” Sumner said. “They warm your blood before they put it back into you, so I wasn’t even cold.
Sumner said she was a little tired after the retrieval process on Monday. “Really, Tuesday and Wednesday, if I hadn’t been in Milwaukee, I could have gone back to work. It just is that easy,” she said. “It’s like they’re drawing blood, is what it feels like, with just the needle stick. Other than that, that’s it. It is just so easy.”
Sumner said Dee’s transplant went off “without a hitch.”
In an effort to encourage others to join the bone marrow donor registry, Sumner chronicled the donation process on a Facebook page — It Doesn’t Hurt - To Save a Life. “To be able to save someone’s life by laying in a bed for five hours -- everybody needs to do it. Everybody needs to get on the bone marrow registry and have that experience. It’s pretty cool,” she said. “You don’t even have to go to where the recipient lives."
Have you considered giving the gift of life saving adult stem cells? join a registry today!