Baby Delivers Hope to Her Sick Brother

Little Ricky Reed’s dream came true this week when his mother gave birth to a baby sister. The 5-year-old boy desperately wanted a little sister, and Raeana Melissa came in at 7 pounds, 9 ounces, topped with a thicket of brown hair.

Ricky and his father, who live at Camp Pendleton, celebrated with dinner at a Dana Point steakhouse.

It’s a little lost on Ricky, his parents say, that the baby also might save his life. Her bone marrow has proved a perfect match to that of her older brother, who has leukemia.

Ricky has battled both the physical and emotional roller coaster of remissions and active outbreaks while undergoing a regimen of chemotherapy and radiation treatments for more than two years. He now is in remission.

His best hope for survival is to have his infected bone marrow replaced with healthy marrow--the thick, almost granular substance within the bone structure that manufactures the blood’s red and white cells.

But none of the 210,000 people listed in the National Bone Marrow Program had exactly the same kind of marrow. But such bone marrow matches are 1-to-20,000 long shots at best, and the chances were worse in Ricky’s case because he’s Latino, and relatively few bone marrow donors are Latino. Ethnicity plays a role in the chemistry of bone marrow.

Chances are a whole lot better--1 in 4--that bone marrow will prove compatible among blood relatives. But neither Ricky’s parents nor his younger brother was a match, either.

Then Theresa and Ricardo Reed found out they were expecting their third child.

“Initially, when we learned we were going to have another baby, we just thought, ‘Wow!’ It wasn’t until a few days later, when Ricky’s doctor sat us down, that we found out that the new baby could maybe be a bone marrow match,” said Ricardo Reed, a Navy corpsman stationed on base.

Therein started another trip of the roller coaster for the family, which lives on the northern fringe of the Marine Corps base, near San Clemente.

“We didn’t know if Richard would even be around to see the baby,” Reed said. “We didn’t know if he’d live that long. We kept hoping for a bone marrow match from the donor program.”

On Sunday, after seven hours of labor at the Navy hospital at Camp Pendleton, Raeana was born. On Wednesday, tests at the UCLA Medical Center showed that the newborn’s blood marrow was an exact match with Ricky’s.

“I don’t know if Ricky still understands what all this means,” his father said. “But he’s just so happy he has a baby sister. That’s the source of all of his joy.”

“She’s our miracle baby,” said Theresa Reed. “Our ups and downs have gone from zero (hope) to this.”

Ricky’s doctor, Navy Capt. William Thomas at the naval hospital at San Diego’s Balboa Park, said he hopes the transplant can occur in about three months. Usually, newborns aren’t tapped for marrow until they’re 6 months old.

“I don’t think we can wait that long,” he said. “Ricky might go into another relapse, and that would be bad news.”

Today, Ricky is scheduled for surgery at the Navy hospital so a catheter can be placed in his chest wall in advance of more chemotherapy and, ultimately, the marrow transplant.

The transplant will occur at Children’s Hospital in San Diego.

Ricky later will undergo a six-day countdown to the surgery, with increasing doses of chemotherapy and full-body radiation treatment to try to kill all the leukemia cells. On Day Zero, with his own bone marrow destroyed, he will receive his baby sister’s. For the next four weeks, doctors will watch for infection because Ricky will not have yet produced enough antibody white blood cells to ward off illness.

Even after the transplant, there is still a 40% to 50% chance Ricky could succumb to leukemia, Thomas said. “We have to kill every leukemia cell, because even just one could regenerate itself, and he’d still have leukemia. But, without this transplant, his chances of living were zero.”

While his parents are still wracked by anxiety, Ricky is tending to a more typical boy’s life.

“We were talking about how he could learn to change diapers,” Thomas said, “and he said, ‘No way. That’s mom’s work.’ ”