Trista Brown finds cure through family

After a tennis match during September 2016, my sister Trista Brown, ’18, was rushed to Valley Children’s Hospital as she said she felt awful. A month later she was diagnosed with Idiopathic Severe Aplastic Anemia or SAA.

During her initial hospital stay, medical staff decided to administer her a blood transfusion and took some of her bone marrow to test. This is when they found out that her bone marrow was not working right, but they did not know the extent of her problem.

Idiopathic Severe Aplastic Anemia is a disease which affects the body so that it cannot produce enough blood cells. Most people do not know, but bone marrow creates three types of blood cells, which are essential to the body. Red blood cells, platelets, and white blood cells are among the things that she is not producing enough of.

With this disease there aren’t many cures for it, but we were lucky to have a HLA match or someone who has a type of bone marrow that the recipient is able to take. In this case we were fortunate enough that I was a 100 percent match for her.

If there are no matches in the family then the closest match they could find would be 50 percent if we were lucky. There are two ways to get the marrow from the donor.

For this particular disease they needed to make sure that they kill all of her bone marrow to make room for the new marrow. Within the first week they were done with chemotherapy. After chemotherapy, her body was able to take the bone marrow from the donor which replaced all of her blood cells in her body.

Before the transplant, they gave her chemotherapy so that her bones will take the new marrow. It took around a week for everything in the bone marrow to die.

In the PBSC donation process, I would have been given injections of Filgrastim, a drug which increases the amount of blood you make. Then after the five days they would take blood from one of my arms and when they had what they needed they would return the rest through the other arm.

The other way was a Bone Marrow Donation, in which they put me to sleep in an operation room. The doctor used a needle to retrieve liquid bone marrow from the back of my pelvic bone. This was the operation that was decided upon.

The decision of what procedure was up to me since I was the match to Trista. I decided to go with the Bone Marrow Donation, because of how it takes less time so less school would be missed. And it is usually the most beneficial to the recipient.

The process was not over after that as she stayed at the University of California San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital which is where the procedure occurred. Afterward she had to go revisit every week for two days, then every month and eventually every year.

To help other people who are more fortunate than you help by donating blood to local blood banks near you. For more information on her visit, read about CaringBridge.

For more articles, read: Student shares personal story, looks up to Olympian.

This writer can be reached via Twitter: @Reese_Brownie and via email: Reese Brown.