Life of Boy, 13, Depends on Search

Like most 13-year-olds, Joshua Kaplan leads a busy life. He collects baseball cards, commands remote-controlled cars, roots for the Padres, smacks a few tennis balls and brings Bach to life on the living-room piano.

But, unlike his friends, Joshua works hard at something else--staying alive.

Joshua suffers from leukemia.

“When I’m at school all day, I really don’t think about it,” said Joshua, who lives with his family in Leucadia. “But, sometimes when I’m alone, it’s like, ‘Wow, how can this be happening to me?’ ”

Remission for Nearly 4 Years

With treatment, the leukemia had been driven into remission for nearly four years, raising family and friends’ hopes that Joshua was rid of the disease. But, in late April, the cancer resurfaced.

Now, Joshua’s best hope for survival is a successful bone marrow transplant.

But the chances of finding the right donor are slim: 1 in 15,000. And the search for the perfect match is exacerbated because so few people have been tested as donors. The National Bone Marrow Donor Registry in St. Paul, Minn.--an organization that maintains a nationwide list of potential donors--has only 34,000 names.

Schools, local hospitals and other organizations from the community are rallying to help Joshua, holding fund-raisers and sponsoring blood tests in an attempt to add names to the donor list. The strategy: the bigger the donor-candidate pool, the greater the chance of making Joshua the lucky 1 in 15,000.

Since mid-May, the Kaplans have recruited more than 1,500 people to take the blood tests. Just as important, supporters have helped raise $75,000--financial aid is greatly needed because each blood test costs $75. But many, many more donors are needed. So the search continues.

On Memorial Day, Scripps Memorial Hospital and Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla will administer blood tests.

“People can come by (to the hospital) early before they go out to the beach,” said Dr. Roy Kaplan, Joshua’s father. “It’s a simple blood test, nothing more. But it could be the first step toward saving my son’s life.”

Joshua added: “Please come.”

Although the family would be grateful if donors could pay for their own tests, Kaplan said shortage of funds shouldn’t deter people from volunteering.

“We know the cost may be prohibitive, so if you can’t pay, that’s OK,” Kaplan said. “We’ll raise the money. We just need people to come.”

If a match is made, the donor will be contacted and asked to give roughly a pint of marrow, the catsup-like substance found within the bone that produces the body’s blood and immune system, said Tammy Brown, a spokeswoman for Life-Savers Foundation. The private, nonprofit organization in Covina was established last September to raise public awareness of marrow transplantation and recruit potential donors.

“Bone marrow transplant. People hear those words and immediately they think it’s something terrible. They get afraid, and don’t want to help,” Brown said.

Simple and Painless

But, in reality, the process is simple and painless, Brown said. In a procedure that takes less than an hour, a hypodermic syringe is used to extract about 5% of the donor’s marrow. The patient is placed under a light general anesthetic

during the process, Brown said.

The donor can return to a normal routine the following day, and the individual’s body will replenish the lost marrow in 10 to 12 days, Brown said.

By trying to help Joshua, donors may save other lives, too. Individuals tested will be listed with the national registry, making their names available to the 9,000 people in the United States who still need marrow transplants and are waiting to find the perfect donor.

Meanwhile, Joshua continues to receive treatment, fighting an illness the Kaplans thought they had licked.

After intensive treatment shortly following his diagnosis in 1985, Joshua’s leukemia went into remission. The illness rarely forced Joshua to miss school. He competed in music festivals, won “all-star” baseball honors for his nifty glove work at second base. He could have been cast as the boy next door.

With such good fortune, the Kaplans celebrated Joshua’s bar mitzvah in April in spirited fashion.

“We were on top of the world,” Kaplan said. “We thought we had beaten this thing. We weren’t just celebrating his bar mitzvah. We were celebrating the end of the disease.”

Ten days later, the leukemia came back.

The disease plays a cruel game with the Kaplans, lulling them into a false sense of hope that it has disappeared, only to resurface again.

“We’ve been living in this ugly nightmare” Kaplan said. “It’s a nightmare that you can’t erase. It keeps playing over and over again.”

Now, the Kaplans want to end the nightmare, and a successful marrow transplant is their only hope. And, while the search for a donor continues, Joshua sticks to his busy schedule to keep his mind off his illness: school work, piano lessons, baseball practice.

But sometimes, even that’s not enough.

“I get afraid,” Joshua said. “The kids at my school don’t have to worry about surviving. They get to live every day. It’s weird that surviving has to be on your mind.”