This feature, the third in a three-part series detailing a teenage cancer experience, discusses an event from 2004 through the eyes of a 10-year-old sibling. Read part one: Cancer diagnosis shatters senior year, and part two: A short-lived remission.

The rain beat against the windows of the hospital room, casting a silhouette on the floor from the dreary sky outside. A mother and son rested in silence, awaiting an announcement from a doctor that would either reverse their dismal emotions or further dishearten their situation.

In his second battle with cancer, my older brother, Scott Regnerus, needed a bone marrow transplant to survive his leukemia. The doctors tested all of his siblings, including myself, but none of us matched him; in fact, we all matched each other perfectly. “How could God have brought him through all the pain of the first cancer treatments, only to end up with this?” my mother said, devastated.

However, before they received the results from the blood tests, the doctors decided to check my mother, Cynthia, and Scott’s father, Rod, to see if either of them would be a match for Scott. They were the last hope for a donor before going to the National Bone Marrow Registry.

The following weeks were agonizing for both of them. “What if it wasn’t in God’s plan to heal Scott?” I remember my mother crying throughout the day as these thoughts raced through her mind.

‘It’s unheard of’

Two weeks of apprehension passed until an answer arrived ? the call for which they had all been praying. “Cynthia, I can’t believe it: You are a 100 percent match to Scott,” the doctor said. “It’s unheard of.”

My mother’s jaw dropped. ?It?s a miracle,” she said, with tears streaming down her face, “a complete answer to prayer.?

The odds of a parent matching a child are “as likely as a random person on the street being a match,” the doctor told my mother. But the odds were on her side.

Now with a donor secured, it was time to begin the transplant process. The doctors crippled Scott?s immune system with almost lethal doses of chemotherapy drugs until he was near death, in order to allow my mother’s cells to make their new home in his body with as little resistance as possible.

When he was sufficiently weakened, they hooked my mother up to a machine for the apheresis process. It extracted blood from her outstretched arms and pumped it to the machine, which isolated the stem cells essential for the transplant. Then it returned the blood to my mother’s body. She sat still for two hours each of the two days, witnessing the process that would save her son?s life.

As my mother watched the blood taken from her body, she prayed it would give life to Scott’s body. “Please spare his life,” she pleaded. “Please make these cells heal him completely. Please do not let him die.”

Although my mother worried that Scott’s body would not accept the transplant, the doctor assured her that such an occurrence is rare.

Scott’s second birthday

Within hours, the cells were delivered to Scott’s room for transfusion into his body. As family members gathered around his bed, they celebrated what they now considered his “new birthday.”

Despite the euphoria of the day, my mother’s anxiety became evident. ?I was thankful that medical science had progressed this far,? she said. ?I know many patients in Scott?s situation had died when they were experimenting with this process.?

However, the struggle had only just begun. Each day following the transplant, the doctors took tests and monitored Scott?s blood counts as they dwindled until leveling off. As soon as the blood counts began to increase, the doctors would know that Scott?s body had accepted the transplant.

A straight line, a short intermission

This was the most difficult part of the process for them. My mother watched as Scott turned pale and grey. ?He looked dead,? she said. He lived on intravenous nourishment and slept for most of the day, barely moving at all. My mother would pray every moment she spent in his room for his body to accept the cells and return from his near lifeless state.

As she looked at his spiritless body, she thought to herself, “Why did he survive the first cancer, just to die now?” He had suffered much throughout his life ? juvenile diabetes since he was a child, cancer his entire senior year and now leukemia. My mother pleaded with God to grant him life.

His hair was gone, his eyebrows had vanished ? even his eyelashes disappeared from his face. “As he slept, I wished I could trade places with him,” my mother said. “I wanted him to have the years to live that I had had.”

Every morning they marked a chart with the blood count results. The plots formed a straight line. They were desperately waiting for a slight upward movement, which would signal the success of the transplant.

Then one day, the graph nudged up. The nurses and doctors entered Scott?s room with smiles on their faces. His body accepted the new cells; he now had a chance to survive. My mother waited for color to return to his face, and to once again see the signs of vitality Scott’s body often failed to demonstrate.

Vulnerable yet unconquerable

The side effects of the chemotherapy now wreaked havoc on Scott’s defenseless body ? the sores in his mouth, the vomiting. “Couldn’t this just be over?” my mother asked herself. “Can’t he just be better?”

We couldn’t even talk to him on the phone when he suffered from these symptoms. He couldn’t eat; he lived on IV nourishment. He barely had enough energy to shower every day, which the nurses required of him. He hated to take showers because he knew that when he returned to bed afterward, more vomiting would ensue.

But slowly, his body gained strength.

Thus began the delicate process of balancing the graft-versus-host disease. Scott?s body perceived the donated cells as foreign, so he was forced to take immune-suppression drugs to prevent his body from attacking the new cells.

While the new cells gave him life, they could just as easily take it away. They could wage war against his organs if this condition were not kept in check. It also made him vulnerable to the simplest illnesses ? a common cold could kill him.

As a 10-year-old at the time, I could not understand this situation. I had thought that once Scott received a transplant, he and my mother could return home to California so our family would be together again. But this was not the case.

He had to be isolated in a sterile environment. Hand-sanitizer and bleach solution could be found in every room of the condo they lived in during this time. The sharp scent of disinfectants permeated the air.

Meat could only be purchased if it was pre-packaged. And even then, it had to be heated in a microwave so all potential germs were eradicated before Scott could put the meat on a sandwich. The tops of food cans had to be sterilized with bleach before they could be opened. He could eat nothing fresh or from a restaurant. All the foods Scott loved, he was now refused.

The long-awaited arrival

The doctors prescribed the immune-suppression drugs for a full year. During this time, my mother sometimes walked the halls of the hospital and saw doctors zipping body bags of patients who had also received a bone marrow transplant. Some of the friends Scott made during his time before the transplant had died. ?I felt the pain of those families,? my mother said. ?But for the grace of God, it could have been Scott.?

For this reason, my mother also felt guilty. Scott was a cancer survivor, but many of the other patients around him had died. As my mother saw all the babies and infants at the hospital who had cancer, she was thankful that Scott lived as long as he did before his first affliction.

But now, at the time of his bone marrow transplant, Scott was the “young” person ? most of the other patients were older adults. All these people had lived out a majority of their lives already. But Scott still had his whole life ahead of him; and yet, even though he survived, his life would never be the same. Each day would be approached differently; each sniffle, each fever ? every sign of illness would necessitate a visit to the doctor’s office for antibiotics.

However, Scott?s recovery continued with favorable results. Although he remained on immune-suppression drugs, he was allowed to come home earlier than anticipated. He had to continue blood tests in Fresno every two weeks. But our family was finally together again, and Scott was alive; to say the least, it was a very emotional homecoming.

Cancer No. 2 had been defeated. Scott’s struggle with his cancers spanned four years and confined him for months in the hospital, but now he was free from their grasp ? he was a cancer survivor. He now sought to reclaim the life his cancers had threatened to cut short.

To read the first part of this series, visit Cancer diagnosis shatters senior year, or to read part two, visit A short-lived remission.