Posted on 03/22/2004 4:47:31 PM PST by bogdanPolska12
SASEBO NAVAL BASE, Japan — A Navy corpsman from the USS Juneau stepped off an airplane and strolled into Ohio’s Dayton International Airport last December looking for a woman he never had met and whose photo he never had seen.
Tiffany Gamble, in Dayton from her home in Xenia, Ohio, never had seen a photo of Seaman Blair Rezny, either. Almost instantly they locked gazes. Both knew they were looking at the right person.
Without saying a word, they embraced like long-separated siblings. Rezny, 22, from Omaha, Neb., and Gamble, also 22, have more in common than their ages.
In 2002, some of Rezny’s bone marrow was placed into Gamble’s frail body, weakened by the fight for her life against aplastic anemia.
For months he submitted to physical exams and gobbled iron and vitamin supplements before the day in June that year when doctors removed two liters of bone marrow from his hip to donate to Gamble. She is now clear of the deadly disease.
“It was a lot of nervous excitement. It’s been like we’ve known one another since the start. I feel like I’ve known her my entire life,” Rezny said of their first meeting and the days that followed. “It’s been an amazing experience with even more amazing after-effects. I’d do it again, or a thousand more times.
“Everyone should be as lucky as I was to do what I was able to do. I was a vessel, and happy to be used as such,” he said.
One last chance
Gamble was 21 and studying at Central Michigan University to become a school psychologist when she learned in September 2001 that she had the disease. Aplastic anemia is a rare, noncontagious disease that occurs when the bone marrow stops making enough blood cells, according to the Aplastic Anemia and MDS International Foundation Inc.
When no matches were found from 275 locals who signed up at four donation drives held for her in Xenia, a community of about 25,000, Gamble was informed that a perfect match was identified through a national registry. Unfortunately, the prospective donor backed out.
“This was a very long process, and I waited for nine months before the transplant. While I waited, I had to have a blood transfusion every week in order to have red blood cells and platelets, so I literally lived on the donations of others,” Gamble recalled.
“I was so close to not making it several times, including a time when I had an abscess develop on my brain and was put on life support,” she said. “And another time my lungs began to bleed and I was on a respirator. Only five percent of the people with the bleeding-lungs condition ever come out of it to survive.”
Rezny’s bone-marrow donation was Gamble’s last chance.
A match
Rezny said the Department of Defense C.W. Bill Young Bone Marrow Donor Center from Kensington, Md., came to Great Lakes, Ill., for a donor drive while he was there training to be a corpsman in the summer of 2001. Rezny filled out a card and gave a blood sample.
He was at his first command at Naval Hospital Twentynine Palms, Calif., in October 2001 when the donor center informed him that he was a preliminary match for someone needing a bone marrow transplant.
After more blood tests, he was flown to Washington, D.C., the following June by the DOD donor center. They administered more physical exams, and made certain he was serious about donating.
Thirty days later he flew back to make the donation.
“The reason for the delay … Tiffany had to undergo intense chemotherapy to destroy her bone marrow so that mine would have a chance to take. If her marrow remained, it would produce blood cells that would kill mine and the donation would be a failure,” Rezny said.
“This is also the reason why during the physical they ... ensured that I was ready and committed to making the donation. Once they begin the chemotherapy, she would be without an immune system, rendering her defenseless against the simplest of viruses and diseases — similar to a late-stage AIDS patient,” he said.
He donated the marrow in July 2002 at the Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va.
“The only long-term problem that I had post-donation was that I was anemic for about a year,” he said. “That has since passed, and I’m 100 percent normal and would do it again in heartbeat.”
Gamble recalled taking the step toward the chemotherapy and radiation that would kill her already-diminished immune system. “At that point, if for some reason it didn’t happen, I would have had no immune system and died.”
Wishing for contact
For the next year, the two were permitted only to send occasional notes that had to be routed through the DOD C.W. Bill Young Bone Marrow Donor Center to make sure they did not include any personal information or photographs. The main reason they are not allowed to exchange personal details for a year after the bone marrow transplant to “protect privacy,” both Rezny and Gamble said. The rationale is that if something goes wrong and the transplant doesn’t work, it is possible that grieving family members or friends might seek out the donor, in some sense looking for a place to assign fault, Gamble explained.
The center sent Rezny periodic reports about how the person who received his donation was doing.
Gamble experienced some initial graft-versus-host disease. Then she developed an infection that required surgery. “The last progress report I received said she was rapidly losing weight, and continuing to battle her body’s adjustment,” he said.
At the one-year post-donation point, Rezny had plans to transfer to Sasebo and serve on the Juneau.
“Tiffany eagerly wanted to meet me as much as I wanted to meet her. We both took it as the next step, and were happy when the time came.” There are many donor/transplant recipient situations where one or both choose never to reveal their identities, he said.
“We share an unspoken bond and will remain friends for life. There are no words that can put into perspective that she is alive today, and it’s because of me. Our friendship has sort of been a given between the both of us.
“I never wanted to just donate and forget,” Rezny said. “I wanted to know the person, the story, her struggle.”
Eventually, he and Gamble began swapping e-mails, talking on the telephone and developing a relationship. “It’s a strange feeling talking to someone you barely know, but share such a connection as we do,” he said of the telephone chats.
They arranged to meet on Dec. 3, 2003, in Dayton’s airport.
‘Unspoken bond’
“It was really an emotional experience meeting him ... I find it hard to put into words. It was like meeting someone in my family, and I really missed him once he had to leave. It’s an unspoken bond of family more than friendship. He is in me,” she said, “literally.”
When Rezny arrived to spend a few days with Gamble and her family, she said it was hard to know how to treat him. “To us, he’s a hero. But he said he didn’t want to be treated like that.
“He wanted to be treated just like anyone else coming to visit, so that’s what we tried to do and the time together was great. He’s very special to me, to my family,” she said.
“I thank God so much for Blair.”
Rezny believes he did what everyone should do when given the chance to help another person in a dire predicament. Gamble’s health is his gift.
“I never had a second thought, and through the whole process of becoming her match, I hoped that I would be the one to do it,” he said. “Helping to save a life is such an awesome opportunity and responsibility. Who wouldn’t want that chance?”
Two LITERS?!? Amazing... but a beautiful story. Thank you.
While to surgery necessary to actually donate the marrow isn't exactly minor, it isn't catastrophic either. Either way, I'm on the national list, and wouldn't think of removing myself at this point. While I only came up a preliminary match once (with further testing revealing incompatabilities which would have proved dangerous to the recipient), there may well come a time when the decision must be made, and with someone else's life on the line, I would decide as Blair did...
the infowarrior
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