St. Joseph Ready to Do 1st Marrow Transplant for an Adult in County

A 31-year-old truck driver with cancer received massive doses of chemotherapy Wednesday as doctors at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange prepared to perform their first bone marrow transplant.

Childrens Hospital of Orange County has performed the operation for the past 2 years on children with leukemia and malignant tumors. But St. Joseph is the first hospital in the county to begin a bone marrow transplant program for adults with cancer.

Once considered experimental, bone marrow transplants in the past few years have become a standard form of treatment for leukemia and often-fatal cancers of the lymph nodes.

Until now, adults who needed the treatment have had to travel to San Diego or Los Angeles because no Orange County hospital offered the procedure.

But after investing $50,000 to build two special rooms and working with transplant experts at CHOC, St. Joseph in September began its own transplant program.

St. Joseph’s first candidate, Hodgkin’s disease sufferer Kenneth Summersgill of Colton, was reported in stable condition Wednesday as the procedure began with what his physician, hematologist-oncologist Richard W. Opfell, described as “supralethal doses of chemotherapy” to kill his lymph cancer.

Before the chemotherapy, Summersgill underwent a series of radiation treatments also aimed at eradicating the cancer.

Next Wednesday Summersgill is expected to be injected with marrow, which was taken from his hip several months ago and stored in anticipation of this surgery.

If the bone marrow transplant “takes,” Summersgill should be producing white blood cells--the cells that fight infection--within 2 to 5 weeks and his chances of beating his once-lethal disease should be good, Opfell said.

“This is like an insurance policy against subsequent relapse,” Opfell said, adding, “If we did nothing, his chances of being alive in 5 years are 10% or less.”

Interviewed Monday, Summersgill said he was fearful about the procedure, including the side effects from the painful chemotherapy injections that would begin in a day. When faced with cancer, “it seems like you don’t have any choices any more,” he said. He noted that there was a chance he could die during the bone marrow transplant itself, but if he went through with it, there was an 80% chance “that I will go past 5 years disease free.”

Because St. Joseph’s transplant program is new, Opfell said, he has had trouble getting patients to participate in it or local doctors to refer patients to the program.

“They don’t want to tell the patient, ‘Here’s a nice place, but they’ve never done any before,’ ” when other transplant centers at UCLA or in Seattle have been doing bone marrow transplants for more than 10 years, Opfell said.

Dr. Richard Champlin, director of UCLA Medical Center’s bone marrow transplant center, was critical of St. Joseph’s new transplant program, suggesting the possibility that it was being started “to enhance the prestige of the hospital rather than to meet the needs of the patients.” He questioned whether Opfell, who has never been part of a bone marrow transplant team, had adequate medical background to start a new program.

Opfell said, however, that in New York he had cared for patients who had had bone marrow transplants. And he noted that CHOC’s transplant experts are working with his team.