Leukemia Victim Beats Odds to Find Donor

Tarzana attorney Marc Smith, suffering from a deadly form of leukemia, searched across the country, hoping to beat odds of 15,000-to-1 against finding a donor with compatible bone marrow for a transplant that doctors said could be all that might save him.

But no donor had been found by the end of January, when doctors feared he might have less than a month to live. So Smith agreed to undergo a riskier procedure, known as an autologous transplant, using his own marrow.

But just hours before he was scheduled to begin preparatory chemotherapy treatment, Smith said, his doctors informed him that a potential donor had been identified.

Smith’s doctors at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle were reluctant to postpone the scheduled transplant. It would take weeks to complete the tests to confirm that the donor was a perfect match. By that time, it might be too late to perform the autologous transplant if the donor’s marrow was incompatible.

But Smith opted to take the risk. Wednesday, he learned the gamble had paid off: the potential donor is indeed a match and Smith is scheduled to have a transplant next week.

“I talked them into it,” Smith said by phone from a sterile, enclosed hospital room where he awaits the transplant.

“They felt I didn’t have the time to wait, but I thought that if there is a donor out there, after all we have done to find one, I wanted to have the transplant,” he said.

After learning in November that Smith needed a bone marrow transplant, his relatives in Los Angeles and New York launched major drives to find a donor. He said they raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for more than 2,000 people to be tested, and held more than a dozen testing sessions on both coasts.

On Dec. 18, Smith appeared on a nationally televised talk show and appealed to viewers to take the test to become bone marrow donors. Thousands responded, and matches were found for several other leukemia patients.

Smith’s family members said they were thrilled Sunday, but Smith said he still has a hard battle ahead of him.

The donor--who remains unknown to Smith and his family--cannot undergo the 30-minute marrow extraction procedure until next week. Smith said that he does not know the reason for the delay--and under the rules of the medical exchange, he is not allowed to contact the donor--but his condition is deteriorating.

Smith said his doctors estimate he has about a 75% chance of recovery if he survives the transplant. The odds of that, he said, are about 50%.

Still, he said, he has beaten the odds once--finding a donor--and he is determined to prevail over the cancer threatening him.

“I have three little boys and I want to make it,” he said. The last-minute match, he said, has bolstered his hopes.

“My chances have been increased tremendously by really what is a miracle,” he said. “If I had come here one day earlier, I would have already started the chemotherapy for the autologous transplant and that would have been it.”

“It is almost like it is meant to be that I pull this one out,” he said.

“I am scared to death, but the bottom line is that I am still here and still fighting.”