Sister-in-law honors man’s memory by donating bone marrow to child

Sister-in-law honors man’s memory by donating bone marrow to child


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PROVO — Julianne Grose has the chance to do something that could have saved her brother-in-law’s life 10 years ago.

Grose, a 39-year-old assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology at Brigham Young University, was contacted two months ago by the National Marrow Donor Program, saying she was a bone marrow match for a child with leukemia. Grose calls it a miracle. She registered as a donor 10 years ago, when doctors could not find a marrow donor match for her brother-in-law, Gregg Schaub, who was fighting Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. Schaub died without treatment.

“When he found out his cancer didn’t respond to any of the treatments, his last chance was the marrow transplant and unfortunately, no one in his family matched,” Grose said.

In the near future — the date is kept private until after the procedures — Grose will donate some of her marrow to the child. Grose is an extremely rare HLA type, and had figured she would never be called upon to donate.

Upon Shaub’s suggestion, Grose and her sister, Jennifer Schaub (now Dickson) began holding fundraisers to register people with the NMDP in 2003. At the time, Grose said, the swab test kit to determine imperative HLA markers in a person’s DNA cost $50 for the potential donor. Their fundraising covered the costs of registration for 1,000 people.

“(NMDP has) a registry of over 10 million people so far who are willing to donate to an unrelated donor,” Grose said. “Unfortunately, rare tissue types are still not represented well, even with that number of donors. We need more people in the registry.”

About bone marrow donations:
  • About 1 in 540 members of the Be The Match Registry in the United States will go on to donate
  • Doctors request donors in the 18-44 age group 90% of the time
  • Patients are most likely to match someone of their own race or ethnicity, making diversity in the database critical.
  • 50% of donors feel mostly recovered after a week
  • 98.5% are recovered after a month
  • Fewer than 1% of PBSC donors experience a serious side effect

Info: National Marrow Donor Program

Despite their efforts and the efforts of people like them, they did not find a donor match for Schaub.

“I think he knew. When we were told that he needed that transplant, that there was no other treatment for him, I think he got to a point that he knew he was getting too sick, that even if we found someone, he was too sick (to recover),” Dickson said. “It was important to him for us to keep going and find someone for someone else. It was his hist last shot, with him being sick, to do something. ...He didn’t just want to lay around and die.”

Grose said her background in science, in addition to her personal experiences with Schaub, helped her understand Schaub’s situation and the importance of raising awareness about what people can do to help.

“I really believe that if we get the word out and tell enough to people what it means to be a donor, people will do it. I think it comes down to awareness,” Grose said. “If I could really express what it is like to be a part of this, I know everyone who could would join the registry.”

The procedure, peripheral blood stem cell, will take place over the course of five days. Doctors will inject Grose with the drug filgrastim each day, which will move stem cells into the bloodstream, and on the final day, over the course of 4 to 8 hours, will collect and filter the blood in a similar method as collecting plasma. The donor recipient will then receive the stem cells.

“When you donate, that person actually, you’re really giving of yourself. Your person inherits your immune system and your blood type,” Grose said. “Honestly, this person becomes a lot like you.”

Donors do not pay for medical costs incurred by the donation, nor do they pay for any donation-related travel expenses or the cost of missing work. Donors may experience different levels of discomfort depending on whether the doctor uses PBSC or draws marrow from the hip bone.

Following the donation, Grose will be able to communicate with the donor recipient through letters monitored by the NMDP. In one year, if the child and their family feels inclined, she will be able to meet them. She hopes they want to meet, and she can’t wait to tell them her story.

“It’s just amazing how attached you feel to someone you’ve never met.” Grose said. “So far it has really been one of the most amazing experiences of my life. So I can only imagine at the end of it, meeting this child in a year, it’s going to be amazing.

“It’s just been a really spiritual experience. I feel strongly that it is the result of a lot of prayers for Gregg. It’s just a really amazing thing to see the miracle come to pass.”

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UtahLifestyle
Celeste Tholen Rosenlof

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