Holan and Donor Strengthen Bond Via First Meeting
The setting--blue skies, green grass, tall roses in full bloom--was all he could ever hope for during the bleakest moments.
Just a chance to enjoy a day in the sunshine with his family.
On Friday, Milos Holan met the man who made it all possible, the donor who provided the bone marrow necessary to help Holan’s body ward off leukemia.
Holan was playing for the Mighty Ducks in 1995 when a routine physical revealed the disease. His survival hinged on a transplant of bone marrow, the soft material inside bones that produces blood cells, including the white blood cells that fight infection. The high levels of chemotherapy and radiation needed to kill cancer cells also destroys a patient’s own marrow and immune system.
The bone marrow must contain enough genetic similarities that the new host won’t reject it. Holan’s sister and parents were not matches, so the only hope was the National Marrow Donor Program.
That’s how the professional hockey player from the Czech Republic living in Orange County came to be linked with a nuclear engineer who lives in Jessup, Md.
That’s why the two of them, Holan and Robert Stransky Jr., held each other’s hands aloft Friday, like winners celebrating a victory in the boxing ring.
The assembled media broke out in applause. Normally that’s taboo at a news conference, but this one was different.
It didn’t matter that the event was overly choreographed and run by a small army of headset-wearing public relations staffers.
Some stories just feel so good, it’s impossible to be cynical. The genuine nature of people always comes through. That’s why when all of the pictures are developed the smiles will all look real, and Holan’s 3-year-old son will be shown holding a worm he had just found.
Holan and Stransky had little contact before Friday. Some of that was by design. The doctors keep the donor-recipient relationship anonymous for the first year, in part to prevent the donor from developing an emotional attachment to a patient who might still die. Gifts are screened to prevent even a hint of the giver’s identity. Stransky wanted to send Holan a T-shirt, but it was rejected because the wording gave away Stransky’s region of the country.
Holan and Stransky had spoken once on the phone. Holan sent Stransky a letter after the player was released by the Ducks last fall and had gone home to play for a team in the Czech Republic, but Stransky couldn’t decipher Holan’s writing well enough to read the return address.
Friday, on the idyllic 110-acre grounds of the City of Hope in Duarte, they finally met and embraced, more than three years after the transplant surgery brought them together in another way.
“I was really emotional and nervous,” Holan said. “I didn’t know what to expect from this meeting.”
He speaks English well, just not well enough to accurately describe how he felt. He tried to sum it up in one word: “Wow!”
Stransky enjoyed himself, but he wasn’t there to bask in glory and he didn’t consider what he did to be heroic. “He did all the work, really,” Stransky said. “I just gave him some spare parts.”
Stransky’s wife is an oncology nurse, so he knew about the need for donors.
“It was a very simple thing to register; all it took was a tube of blood and they do a little tissue typing,” said Stransky, who works for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It was really not much work on my part at all. It was sort of like buying a lottery ticket. There’s a one-in-a-million chance that you’re gonna match. But I guess I won.”
The marrow was withdrawn at Johns Hopkins medical center in Baltimore on a wintry February morning. The entire hospital visit, including the inevitable waiting periods, took six hours.
“Marrow donation is such a simple thing,” said Stransky, who said he experienced minimal discomfort. “It’s just a couple hours in a hospital. . . .
“I was out running and playing with the dogs the next day. It was no big deal at all.
“I don’t understand why people don’t get into the registry. I think if people understood how important it is to be able to be an organ donor, whether it be bone marrow or any other organ, you can really help someone else out. I can’t comprehend why people aren’t willing to do it.”
For me, any discussion about leukemia automatically brings to mind Rod Carew, whose daughter, Michelle, died of the disease in 1996.
It would be a disservice to Carew and the memory of Michelle not to state Carew’s ongoing plea for minorities to register as donors.
Carew is of West Indian and Panamanian descent; his wife is of Russian-Jewish descent. That mixture diminished the possibility of finding a match for Michelle, and no donor was found.
Only 792,000 of the 3.6 million registered bone marrow donors are members of minority groups, according to the City of Hope.
“If you are Caucasian, Scandinavian-American, you have a good chance of finding a match,” said Dr. Stephen Forman, the director of hematology/bone marrow transplantation at the City of Hope Cancer Center. “Here, we have a donor recruitment that’s focused on trying to bring into the registry African Americans, Native Americans, Ashkenazi Jews, Cambodians, Chinese . . . because they’re not represented well in the registry.”
Standing next to each other, the athletic-looking Holan and the, well, engineer-looking Stransky bore little resemblance. Their only similarity was where it counted, in the blood. In fact, Stransky pointed out, their close genetic makeup means Stransky would be the perfect donor if Holan ever needed an organ transplant.
The more time passes, the better the long-term prognosis for Holan.
“I enjoy every day,” he said. “Before I got sick, my first priority was hockey. After that, I figured health, that’s the first thing, and my family, that’s the second thing. Hockey right now is, I don’t know, my 100th thing. Nothing is more important than your health and your family.”
The family just welcomed a new member.
For more information on donor registry, call the City of Hope Donor Center at (626) 301-8386.
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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com.