By JOSH PHILLIPS
NAS Patuxent River Public Affairs

PATUXENT RIVER NAVAL AIR STATION, MD—Robert Kendall may have just saved the life of a person he has never met.

Kendall, an aviation electronics technician for the Aircraft Intermediate Maintenance Department here, has given a leukemia patient a second chance at life by way of a bone marrow transfusion.

Although Kendall doesn’t know who the person is or what condition he is in now; the only information he needed to make his decision was where he needed to donate and when.

“The person who was terminally ill with cancer needed my help, so that’s what I did,” Kendall said.

While attending “A” school in Pensacola, Fla., in March 1998, Kendall signed up for a bone marrow drive for a child suffering from leukemia. Kendall learned that the chances of his marrow stem cells matching needs of the sick child were miniscule. And although his chance of ever becoming a donor were one percent, his information was kept in the National Marrow Donor Program Registry for a possible future match.

According to the NMDP, patients best chances of finding matching donors come from within their own families, because tissue types are inherited. Even so, there is still only a 30 percent chance that a patient will find that match with a relative. The rest must search for unrelated donors.

Established in 1987, the NMDP has helped to facilitate more than 6,500 marrow transplants for patients in need. The program works through networks of donor centers that recruit and educate volunteer donors, and through transplant centers and hospitals that provide care for patients and recipients. Volunteer donors join the registry through donor centers, which may be part of a local blood bank or hospital.

And because of Kendall’s previous donation in 1998, the registry was able to match up Kendall with a patient desperately in need of a transplant.

“I went on leave for Christmas and my mom said that they called three days ago and told her that I was a possible match,” he said. “I called them back immediately, thinking that I was just going to hop back in the car and drive to where ever they wanted me to.”

But there was much more testing to be done before Kendall would be asked to donate.

With aid from his command and from the station medical clinic, Kendall underwent several more blood-screening tests to ensure that he was not only the proper marrow donor, but that his blood was free of any diseases. In one sitting, Kendall had 15 vials of blood taken for the screening process.

“There is an awful lot of work and screening involved just to get in this position to help the person,” Kendall said. “You don’t want to infect them with a blood disease on top of what they already have.”

After his tests came back negative, plans were made for Kendall to donate marrow at Georgetown University Medical Center on Jan. 17 and 18.

To make sure that Kendall would have enough stem cells in his blood stream at the time of the procedure, he was injected with a drug called Neupogen twice a day for four days. Neupogen increases white blood cells and causes an increased numbers of stem cells to move from the bone marrow to the blood stream.

Although the injections increased the quantity of stem cells needed, the process isn’t without risks.

“I was told that any exercise could be fatal,” Kendall said. “Normal physical training could kill me. The first few days I would feel fine, but by the third and fourth day, I wouldn’t want to go outside. It really slowed me down, so I had to limit all my physical movements.”

The procedure didn’t require a hospital stay, so Kendall and his mother Jeanne stayed in a hotel close to GUMC and spent much of their time sightseeing.

Jeanne, a retired nurse living in South Portland, Maine, flew in to observe the procedure that her son would soon undergo.

“They flew her down so she could keep an eye on me,” Kendall said. “She was curious about the procedure but not really worried about me. It was when I started to get the Neupogen shots [that] she really watched me closely, as a nurse and a mom would.”

Instead of drawing the marrow from the pelvic bone with a giant needle and syringe, as in the past, Kendall instead underwent a process called apheresis, where the marrow is collected directly from the bloodstream.

During apheresis, blood is removed from a vein, run through a machine that separates the white blood cells and stem cells from the rest of the blood, which is then returned to the body through a separate vein.

This procedure is not as common as the other extraction methods, as less then 10 percent of donors have adequate veins in their arms to provide a steady flow.

“They hooked me up so I had blood coming out of my right arm that went into a centrifuge machine,” said Kendall. “After the procedure was done, the doctors were in a rush to get it to a courier so it could reach the patient. It was a critical delivery.”

The timing was critical because the recipient had just undergone radiation therapy to kill all the diseased bone marrow cells. If the patient was going to survive, the transfusion had to take place immediately.

Kendall was told that he wouldn’t be able to learn the status of the recipient for more than a year. Because donors often develop emotional attachments to the recipients, both positive and negative results are withheld to keep such ties from developing further.

“All they’ll tell me is that he’s a 49-year old male,” Kendall said. “I don’t know anything else. I’m hoping for a success story. I’m really hoping that this guy recovers.”

Kendall notes that none of this would have been possible without the aid and quick response by both AIMD and the medical clinic staff here.

“Both the AIMD and the medical clinic have gone full-tilt to help me out and make this work. The chain of command has been extremely supportive of everything,” he said. “Timing is everything in this procedure and we didn’t want them to have to wait on the Navy, we wanted to be waiting on them.”

Although the chances are slim that he’ll have to ever donate again, Kendall says he wouldn’t hesitate if he knew that someone was counting on him for help.

Over 30,000 people in the United States are struck with leukemia each year. Of that, 70 percent cannot find suitably matched marrow donors in their families. That is why the need for bone marrow volunteers is so strong.

“It’s like I tell people, science has invented a gun to kill this disease, but the bullets are provided by you and me,” he said “There are over five million people on the bone marrow registry, but we need an awful lot more, it’s just not nearly enough.”

-USN-