Mighty Ducks Player’s Goal Is Winning Leukemia Fight : Medicine: Marrow transplant offers Milos Holan cure unavailable to young athlete killed by disease 20 years ago.

Milos Holan reported for his preseason physical with the Mighty Ducks in September full of excitement about the season ahead--a season destined, he was sure, to be his best yet. Instead, he learned within weeks that he has a slow-progressing form of leukemia.

Twenty-two years ago, Minnesota Twin shortstop Danny Thompson entered a doctor’s office with the same sense of anticipation about the coming baseball season.

But the news came to both young athletes in the same mind-numbing succession: a routine blood test, an alarmingly high white blood cell count, more tests, a diagnosis of chronic granulocytic leukemia, disbelief. Surely someone had switched the vials.

Both were at the peak of their youth, but both had a silent disease that without treatment would one day turn deadly.

Both also were determined to keep playing. There was--and is--no medical reason not to, and Thompson proved that by playing four seasons after his diagnosis.

“Sometimes I wanted to shout, ‘Listen, I can still play this game!’ ” Thompson wrote in a book chronicling his 1973-75 seasons. “I’m not going to die this year. Hell, I might make the All-Star team!”

So much about their cases is strikingly the same, but 20 years of dramatic medical advances have given Holan, 24, something Thompson didn’t have: a lifeline, a cure.

With a successful bone marrow transplant, Holan can beat his leukemia and live a normal life.

When Thompson was diagnosed, marrow transplantation was still young--and was not even attempted on patients with the form of leukemia he was diagnosed with. He died in 1976.

“Someone like [Thompson], if he were alive today, we’d look first at his family to see if there was a donor and then you’d look at the international registry to see if there was a donor,” said Dr. Stephen Forman, director of hematology and bone marrow transplantation at the City of Hope Medical Center in the San Gabriel Valley town of Duarte.

First attempted in 1956 and performed successfully in the late 1960s, marrow transplantation was a terribly dangerous procedure that failed far more often than it succeeded. Because of that, it was usually tried only in the advanced stages of the disease, and wasn’t even considered for patients in a chronic phase.

Today, early marrow transplants are the definitive treatment for patients such as Holan, and a successful transplant before the leukemia turns acute can produce a cure.

For Thompson, there were only experimental treatments--he alternately called himself “a pioneer” and “a guinea pig”--that did not succeed.

He played four more seasons, a vibrant inspiration to leukemia patients and his own teammates before his illness abruptly turned acute and killed him at 29, not quite four years after his diagnosis and only three months after he finished the season with the Texas Rangers.

If Thompson were alive today, he would have what Holan has--perhaps better than a 70% chance to live with a bone-marrow transplant before the disease turns acute, typically within five years of the diagnosis. Even without a transplant, there have been promising results from treatment with the drug interferon, begun in the last decade.

“The therapeutic options in the 1970s were pretty limited as opposed to the 1990s,” said Forman, who has consulted on Holan’s case.

The advances have been remarkable, and many have occurred in Holan’s lifetime. Early transplants were performed on patients who received marrow from an identical twin, providing hope for only the few so blessed. Later, doctors learned to match patients with donors who were close relatives, and then with complete strangers, performing the first successful transplant from an unrelated donor in 1979.

That has been a very significant advance, since only 30% of patients in need of transplants have a relative whose marrow closely matches their own. Holan is one of the other 70%: He and his only sister, Radka, did not match. But with the 1987 establishment of a well-organized registry of 1.8 million potential donors run by the National Marrow Donor Program, about 65% of those patients eventually find matches.

Now Holan is playing a strange waiting game, with the search of the donor registry and affiliated international registries underway. The hunt can take weeks to months, but each month, about 80 patients hear the good news that a donor has been found. Holan is biding his time, not asking for updates.

“I’m waiting until Christmas” when his parents will arrive from the Czech Republic, he said. “I can’t be every day like, ‘Oh my God, they didn’t find anyone.’ ”

He takes comfort from--and gives comfort to--his wife, Irena, and their 5-year-old daughter, Veronica, still too young to know the concerns of her parents.

The struggles of a professional athlete rarely remain private, but because of their visibility people such as Thompson and Holan often find there are others--strangers to them--who want to help.

When Holan returned from the team’s first road trip after he made his condition public, he was greeted with loads of mail from fans, including some fans who are young and ill--patients at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County.

“I had a lot of letters from people who had this,” Holan said. “I like that because I can talk to them about how it was in the hospital, ask how they felt after the transplant and then how they felt afterward.”

Twenty-odd years ago, Thompson’s mailbox overflowed too.

“I look for your name each day in the box score,” a woman wrote. “Knowing you’re playing with leukemia helps me fight my illness.”

Reading that made Thompson feel like a hero, even if he went 0 for 4 or made two errors.

Hockey is Holan’s escape, but already he has found the most difficult times are when the Ducks are on the road--especially when he is out of the lineup, as he has been the past nine games.

“It’s hard when I’m not playing. Too much time to think,” Holan said. “It’s better when I’m at home with my wife. We can talk about it a lot.”

It was much the same for Thompson.

“Baseball was my escape--the only time I was able to stop thinking about my leukemia,” he wrote in the diary he self-deprecatingly titled “E-6”--the scorer’s code for an error by the shortstop. “That was the way it was during the early stages of the 1973 season. I was playing regularly and thinking only about an upcoming game, the pitcher I would face that night, or the pennant race.

“When I was injured and not playing, road trips were very rough--mentally. I had time to lie in my hotel room and think about my personal problems. When was this thing going to start affecting me. Would I ever be a regular major league player again. If I died, what would happen to my family.”

Thompson, just an average shortstop, struggled with injuries the first season after his diagnosis. His batting average fell 51 percentage points after he had hit .276 the year before.

But the next year he hit .250 and won back his starting position.

“Baseball was fun again,” he wrote. “I didn’t spend the season lying in my hotel room worrying about my leukemia. I didn’t entertain any weird thoughts that the disease was affecting my muscles. It was virtually a carefree year, especially when the team started winning.”

The next year, 1975, Thompson batted .270, played in 112 games, and hit two of his 11 career home runs. Early in the season, when his average reached .321, Dr. Murray Silverstein of the Mayo Clinic joked that he was leaving to join the Twins. To be the team doctor? Thompson asked.

“No, the batting coach. Look how much I’ve helped you,” Silverstein said.

Thompson battled the stress of his condition with an irrepressible sense of humor, much as Holan did when Duck Coach Ron Wilson teased him that he could only be so lucky if Wilson, a high-scoring defenseman when he played, turned out to be Holan’s marrow match, somehow imparting his scoring touch.

Holan countered quickly: “I’d prefer Ray Bourque,” he said, choosing the Boston Bruin star.

“It’s a good idea to joke with me and keep my mind positive,” he said.

Thompson soon found that he was sometimes left out of the lineup for reasons that were unclear: Was it merely performance or was management concerned that his condition was affecting him?

Holan, one of the Ducks’ most talented defenseman, has been the odd man out as the team has gone on a two-week roll, and he is waiting for his next chance, though Coach Ron Wilson seems hesitant to play him, saying Holan “hasn’t been the same” since his diagnosis.

“If others went into slumps,” Thompson wrote, “it was because they were holding their bats wrong, or dropping their shoulders, or turning their heads. But if I had a slump, it was because I had leukemia.”

Larry Hisle, now a coach in the Toronto Blue Jays system, was Thompson’s roommate with the Twins, and the two players grew extremely close.

“Danny was the type he really never wanted much publicity at all,” Hisle said. “He was the type who wanted his performance to really speak for him. He wouldn’t want anyone to know if he felt they might feel sorry for him. He certainly wanted to avoid pity.”

In Thompson’s own words, “I didn’t want to make an error and have people say, ‘Well, you can’t blame him, he has leukemia.’ ”

“If I strike out with the bases loaded, or make an error that costs the team a run, I hope someone yells from the stands, ‘Thompson, you’re a bum!’ ”

Like Holan, Thompson was required to have blood tests every week to monitor his white blood cell count, even when the team was on the road.

But unlike Holan, Thompson soon began experimental treatment--an unsuccessful early attempt at immunotherapy that involved injecting live leukemia cells from another patient into his arm.

Holan is taking only hydroxyurea, a drug to lower his white blood cell count whose main side effect is nausea, though Holan said he has had none.

Thompson’s therapy resulted in festering sores caused by the injections, and they made his arm so sore he feared congratulatory slaps when he hit a rare home run.

Thompson sometimes had violent reactions to the shots.

“At times it was worse than others. He’d be very sick vomiting, so ill he’d have to lay down, couldn’t stand,” Hisle recalls.

“I’ll never forget one day we were about to go to [batting practice] and Danny was feeling ill. He said, ‘Larry, you have to promise me you won’t tell the manager.’ I told him, ‘Danny, I always hoped you wouldn’t put me this situation. I care too much about you to not say anything. If that is your wish, I’ll do it, but it’s going to hurt me.’ After some more discussion, he finally took the day off. He just wanted to play every game.”

Once, Thompson became alarmed during a game when his palms started itching and his right eye swelled.

Rod Carew, a Twins teammate whose 17-year-old daughter, Michelle, is now also battling leukemia, saw Thompson’s eye and started to call for the trainer when Thompson begged him not to.

“Don’t say anything. It’ll be all right,” Thompson told him.

“I really didn’t believe that,” Carew says now. “I was thinking, ‘It’s the leukemia!’ ”

But people in the dugout saw Thompson’s eye, and the team doctor examined him--for what turned out to be an allergic reaction to spicy mustard on the two hot dogs he ate between games of a doubleheader.

Incredibly, in June of 1976, the Twins traded Thompson to Texas, even though Thompson was receiving treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

“That hurt me for a number of reasons,” Hisle said. “Back then, unlike today, owners didn’t think about players the way they do now. We were just assets to hopefully make them money.

“I know today that never would happen. The team would have shown support for him and his family and keep him there to make his situation as easily bearable as possible.”

Thompson finished the season as a utility infielder for the Rangers, batting .222. But more and more often, he awakened with a pain near his stomach, an indication of a swollen spleen that meant that his white blood cell count was up.

That November, he went in for a checkup. His spleen was removed, but on Dec. 10, 1976, Thompson died. The end came so quickly that Hisle didn’t have a chance to say goodby.

“I still feel that my life was enriched having the opportunity to spend time with Danny,” Hisle said. “He was a very unique fun-loving, honest, decent person, one of the most decent human beings I ever met in my life.”

Harmon Killebrew, who had been a teammate with the Twins, spoke of his love for Thompson, “an unselfish guy, a good person, a very courageous young man.” Together, Killebrew and Hisle headed efforts to raise money in Thompson’s memory “to help cure this thing.”

Thompson didn’t get that chance.

“Danny was the type of person, I say this in all sincerity, if he needed a bone marrow transplant and the only people who could give it to him were his fellow professional athletes, I guarantee everyone who played with or against him would have been in line,” Hisle said. “I’d have been right at the forefront.”

Holan’s Mighty Ducks teammates were at the forefront Tuesday, lining up to be tested as possible donors.

Holan has read a stack of books about his condition, and he knows he has a chance people didn’t have 20 years ago, “but I still have to find a donor,” he said.

Once one is located, Holan will undergo the transplant shortly, ending his season and beginning a different struggle. Marrow transplantation is still a dangerous procedure because of the risk of complications such as infection and a type of rejection known as graft-versus-host disease.

The recovery takes time, with weeks of isolation in the hospital and following release, close observation for the first 100 days.

“He could be back to a normal life within a year,” Mighty Ducks General Manager Jack Ferreira said doctors have told him. “But that’s a normal life--that’s not playing hockey. I’m not even thinking about that.”

Neither is Holan.

“Right now I’m not thinking about my career first,” he said. “This is hockey, I’ll only play hockey 15 years of my life. It’s just part of my life.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Cure for Leukemia

Milos Holan has chronic granulocytic leukemia, a slow-growing form of leukemia found mainly in adults. It can be cured with successful bone marrow transplant. Marrow, the soft, fatty tissue found in bone cavities, is the body’s blood factory.

Down to the Marrow

Diseased bone marrow must be replaced. Transplanting a donor’s healthy marrow to the patient helps marrow grow. Here are the steps involved:

1. If blood match is found, patient undergoes intensive pre-transplant chemotherapy or radiation to wipe out all disease. Because treatment destroys immune system, potential recipient probably will die unless marrow transplant is received.

2. Donated marrow extracted during hourlong procedure under general anesthesia. Doctors extract 2% to 5% of donor’s liquid marrow from back of pelvis with special needle and syringe.

3. Donated marrow transfused directly into patient’s bloodstream, much like a blood transfusion. Healthy marrow cells travel to bone cavities, where they begin to grow and replace old marrow.

To Donate

Bone-marrow donation is painless, but because of anesthesia a donor’s lower back area may be sore for about a week. The donor’s marrow replenishes itself within a few weeks. If you are interested in donating or learning more about the procedure, call the Southern California chapter of the American Red Cross, (213) 739-4594.

Sources: American Medical Assn. Encyclopedia of Medicine, National Marrow Donor Program, “Bone Marrow Transplants: A Guide for Cancer Patients and Their Families,” Dr. Craig Milhouse