Donor Brother Due in U.S. Today : Viet Refugee Feared Too Ill to Live Until Transplant

Doctors treating Vo Tien Duc said Thursday that they fear the critically ill Vietnamese refugee will die before they can perform a bone marrow transplant from his younger brother, who is scheduled to arrive here late today. The brother, Vo Hoang Van, is flying to Chicago after a three-week-long extraordinary international effort to locate him and bring him to the United States from Vietnam.

Van’s mission of mercy has involved the cooperation of the governments of two nations long hostile toward each other, and of doctors in three states and three countries. It is unprecedented in a decade of relations with Vietnam, according to the State Department.

Massive Bleeding

“I’m not sure he can make it . . . he might not last until then (a transplant operation),” Dr. Melody A. Cobleigh said late Thursday, explaining that Duc--who fled Communist-ruled Vietnam in a small boat 7 1/2 years ago--was experiencing massive internal bleeding. Cobleigh has attempted to tell Duc that his brother is en route but said she is uncertain whether he understands.

Duc, 33, and the father of four children ranging in age from 5 months to 4 years old, is suffering from aplastic anemia, an anemia characterized by the defective function of blood-forming organs such as bone marrow. His only hope for life is the bone marrow transplant from 18-year-old Van. In the last two days, doctors have replaced Duc’s entire blood supply three times, Cobleigh said. “I just hope he makes it long enough.”

Thursday afternoon, Duc was rushed from his sterile isolation room for an emergency liver scan in an effort to determine the source of the bleeding, which doctors said was a sign that his condition was worsening “severely.”

Meanwhile, Van, who was located and given special permission by his government to leave Vietnam for the emergency transplant, was to set foot on American soil this afternoon and arrive in Chicago late tonight. Once here, it could still be five days before all tests and preparations are completed for the marrow transplant.

‘I’d Do It Immediately’

“If it were up to me, I’d do it immediately and not wait for the tests,” said Cobleigh, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Illinois medical school and an oncologist. But a final decision on the transplant, which involves taking bone marrow from Van’s hip bone and injecting it into Duc’s bloodstream, will be made by doctors at the Loyola University Medical Center, which has agreed to do the $100,000 transplant even though Duc cannot pay.

“I feel happy to see everybody helping,” said Duc’s wife, Lang Phung, 26, through an interpreter.

“I never thought they (the Vietnamese government) would let him out,” said Hoa Truong, a close family friend who raised $5,000 to pay for Van’s air fare.

“I couldn’t believe the Communists let him out,” said Truong, a former pilot in the South Vietnamese air force who fled just hours before North Vietnamese troops marched victorious into Saigon, the former capital, 10 years ago next week.

Duc, whose family lives on public aid and some assistance from friends, has been ill for a month and unemployed for the last four years. Doctors working to save his life have cut through a mountain of red tape and secured free medical services in the United States and in Vietnam and Thailand, where blood tests were begun on Van.

“Everybody, including the U.S. and Vietnamese governments, have done all that they can to save him,” said Cobleigh. “I think it is a miracle that everything has worked out this far. I just hope he makes it long enough.”