Baby’s Birth Offers New Chance of Life for Brother

When little Ricky Reed’s mother gave birth to a 7-pound, 9-ounce girl, he got more than the little sister he had always wanted.

He got another chance at life.

Her bone marrow has proved a perfect match to that of her older brother, who has leukemia.

Five-year-old Ricky has battled both the physical and emotional roller-coaster of remissions and active outbreaks of the disease while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments for more than two years. He now is in remission once again.

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 could provide a match. Bone marrow matches among the general population are 1-to-20,000 long shots at best. Chances are much better--1 in 4--that bone marrow will prove compatible among blood relatives. But neither Ricky’s parents nor his younger brother were a match, either.

Then Theresa and Ricardo Reed learned 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 . . . that we found out that the new baby could be a bone marrow match,” said Ricardo Reed, a Navy corpsman stationed on base.

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

“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.”

Unlike the controversial case of a Los Angeles couple whose baby, born earlier this year, was conceived to provide marrow for their stricken teen-age daughter, this baby was not conceived as the source of Ricky’s cure, Theresa said. “It’s really something to think that he could be saved by his sister.”