Bone-marrow donation saves life

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Madelyn Waychoff
  • 388th Fighter Wing Public Affairs
HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah (AFPN) --  A 388th Maintenance Group airman here got a special phone call recently -- from a woman whose life he helped save with a bone marrow donation.

“When I was in school four years ago, they were having a bone marrow drive,” said Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Dorman. “I just thought, ‘what the heck,’ and gave them a little sample of blood. It caught me off guard last year when I got a call saying I was a preliminary match as a donor for a 31-year-old female.”

The doctors would not tell Dorman anything else about the patient. He said they did not want him to feel obligated to participate in the procedure. But now, more than a year later, he said he knows both sides of the story.

“He is my personal hero,” said Deanna Cater, 32, a resident of Michigan.

Doctors diagnosed Cater with Myelodysplastic Syndrome, or MDS, with severe Myelofibrosis in 2001. MDS is a collection of potentially life-threatening disorders in which bone marrow does not produce enough blood cells and turns to fibrous tissue, according to officials at the Myelodysplastic Syndromes Foundation.

At first, doctors thought Cater suffered from gall bladder disease, but a trip to the emergency room and a puzzling loss of blood led to more tests. When doctors discovered they could not extract any bone marrow from their patient -- just a small amount of moisture that was not capable of reproducing blood cells -- they reached a diagnosis.

Between the diagnosis and the bone-marrow procedure, Cater underwent 75 blood transfusions, and just before the procedure, she endured chemotherapy for nine days.

“I couldn’t wait to hear from her,” Dorman said. “I kept thinking, ‘How’s she doing?’ and ‘Did it work?’ It made it all worth it to hear from her and know she was doing really well.”

“I wanted to let him know how incredible he is,” Cater said. “I needed him to know … that what he did was very important, and I wouldn’t be alive today without him. What he did is just amazing.”

Dorman’s gift was even more important after Cater’s first scheduled donor backed out after $14,000 worth of tests.

“Don’t even get tested and place yourself in the donor registry if you don’t plan on going through with it,” Cater said. “The person could get their hopes up only to be let down. Only do it if you know 100 percent that you will go through with it. That is why Jeff is my hero.”

Though Dorman admits stories of needles in the hip scared him, he was not going to let the patient down.

“There was no backing out for me,” he said. “After I’d heard what she was going through, there was no way I could.”

But the process Dorman went through was different. Doctors at the C.W. Bill Young Marrow Donation Center in Washington, D.C., used an apheresis procedure instead. In that type of procedure, blood is drawn from the arm and passed through a blood-separating machine that separates and collects the platelets, plasma and red cells. Then the machine returns the rest of the blood to the donor, according to officials at the Blood Center of New Jersey.

For the five days before the procedure, doctors gave him shots of Filgrastim, a drug that increases the number of T-cells the body produces.

“It made my bones swell, and my back felt like it was being crushed. But my pain was nothing compared to hers. I was back to normal after (two days),” Dorman said.

Cater said she only knew that her donor was a male with A-positive blood. Doctors had told both patient and donor they could exchange personal information only if things were going well after a year, and only if both parties agreed.

“I feel great about what I did,” Dorman said. “I learned that the difference you can make in someone’s life by going through a little bit of pain is amazing. But after I listened to her story, I knew that what I went through was nothing. I wouldn’t think twice about doing it again.” (Courtesy of Air Combat Command News Service)