It’s Looking Good for Krystle, 3 : Bone-Marrow Surgery Gives Toddler a Chance

Inside Krystle Lee’s toy room, there is a wooden rocking horse that she received when she was 2 years old from the Make-A-Wish Foundation, an organization that attempts to grant the wishes of terminally ill children.

The horse is now just a reminder of a time when Krystle had only a 15% chance of surviving her battle with cancer with conventional therapy.

Nine months after she became the county’s second bone-marrow transplant (the first patient died a few days after a similar operation), Krystle, now 3, is running, playing games and giving hope to other parents of children battling cancer.

“When I bring her to the hospital for checkups, every parent is happy to see her. They call her the miracle baby,” Krystle’s mother, Kim Lee, said in an interview Friday in her Santa Ana home.

50% Have a Chance

Dr. Geni Bennetts, a cancer specialist at Childrens Hospital of Orange County, where Krystle had her bone marrow transplant last July, said that 50% of the cancer patients who undergo high-dosage chemotherapy and subsequent bone-marrow transplants, as Krystle did, remain in remission.

Right now, she said, Krystle is in “solid remission.”

“She’s doing wonderfully well. . . . There is some risk of relapse. But maybe after two years we’ll be able to say it is unlikely to recur,” Bennetts said.

When she was 17 months old, Krystle was diagnosed with a cancer--neuroblastoma--that affects the nervous system. The disease had spread to her bones, her lungs and to an area near the base of her skull.

Doctors said she had a 15% chance of surviving her cancer with the conventional chemotherapy treatment. With the consent of her parents, the cancer specialists decided to combat the spreading cancer with extremely high doses of chemotherapy drugs that would not only kill the cancer but also her bone marrow, forcing a need for a marrow transplant.

Bone marrow is the tissue that produces various blood cells and is essential to the body’s defenses against infection. Doctors at Childrens Hospital were able to harvest and freeze a sample of Krystle’s own marrow, which they later reintroduced to her system after the intense chemotherapy session.

Unexpectedly, Krystle was able to go home 32 days after the transplant and a week later was running around, her mother said.

Weekly Checkups

Krystle still needs to visit the hospital once a week for checkups and must undergo so-called CAT scans every three months, Lee said. In December, she was hospitalized briefly because there was fear that she was developing pneumonia, she added.

Still, Lee said her daughter no longer has to undergo painful chemotherapy and radiation sessions and she now has a healthy appetite.

Bennetts said that since Childrens Hospital began performing bone marrow transplants last June, eight “high-risk” patients have been treated. Four have survived and are still in remission, he said.