There are just some moments that defy all odds, even in medicine. In this episode, Dr. Oz explores some of the most incredible medical miracles and remarkable recoveries that will inspire us all. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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| She was crying when I told her what the problem was, and I told her he had a horrible injury to his neck, and it was affecting his breathing, and we needed to operate, and he may never walk again. | |
| There was a good chance, a better chance that he wouldn't than he would, and she cried, and she said, I need to speak to my baby, and then he tells her that he loves her. | |
| He doesn't want her to worry because she's going to get better and tell the girls that he loves them. | |
| Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. | |
| When Kevin Everett, who was a tight end for the Buffalo Bills, was cruising down the field to make a wonderful tackle on Dominic Hickson, and when the two of them collided, these two real strong guys collided, Kevin's head snapped forward and he fell to the ground, sort of like a puppet that's been dropped, you know, a marionette whose strings have been cut from. | |
| And we saw at the time a physician run out there together with the rest of the medical team. | |
| You couldn't really tell with the TV cameras rolling, specifically what was going on, but you could tell there was a lot of angst. | |
| Players had crowded around Kevin Everett, and they were off to the side praying. | |
| And we went back and revisited that event. | |
| And we revisited it because Kevin Everett, the football player who had been injured, has made a remarkable recovery. | |
| And so I've got the honor today of spending a few minutes with Andy Cappuccino, who is the orthopedic surgeon that took care of Kevin, who was someone I got to spend a little time with in Buffalo. | |
| Andy, thanks for joining us. | |
| Thank you. | |
| So I was telling Oprah what you were like, and I said, well, you know, the reality is we sort of bonded on the football field. | |
| And she said, how so? | |
| I said, well, the Buffalo Bills football stadium, of course, is in the snow path. | |
| So it had a couple inches of snow on it anyway. | |
| But in addition, they had played a hockey game on it a few weeks earlier and covered it with ice. | |
| So, Dr. Cappuccino, who's a fairly athletic type and I, went out there with shovels and shoveled a little square in the AstroTurf so we could actually figure out where Kevin had fallen to the turf. | |
| And I said, he wasn't unwilling to roll up his sleeves. | |
| And that's exactly what you did when you're taking care of Kevin. | |
| Can you go through with the audience what happened that day and what it was like for you and some of the big decisions you had to make? | |
| Sure, it was certainly a very frightening situation to see a professional football player Face down on the field and make a diagnosis of a cervical spinal cord, a neck injury that had him paralyzed. | |
| He was on the field. | |
| He couldn't breathe. | |
| And we have a drill with the Buffalo Bills medical staff that we use whenever someone is injured in such a manner. | |
| Our drill worked like clockwork. | |
| In conjunction with the other medical doctors and the trainers on the team, we were able to rapidly stabilize Kevin's neck on the field, meaning by using manual traction, hold it in line, And secure it while he's still in his uniform on a special spine-related backboard, get him on an ambulance, and within 13 or 14 minutes, have him well on his way to the hospital. | |
| In speaking with Kevin himself, who was having difficulty breathing because of his high-level neck injury, we made the decision to institute some fairly controversial therapies as well as standard cares for a neck injury. | |
| Among those things we decided to use high-dose steroids, which steroid methylprednisolone by name is a medicine that helps to shrink inflammation and protect the nerves of the spinal cord. | |
| It works for other parts of the body too, but in this instance it was utilized to help protect his spinal cord injury. | |
| The other thing we did was we knew that if we could lower his body temperature, he was all heated up, he was all sweaty, he was playing in a football game at the NFL level, There's some body of literature, Mehmet, that helps us to believe that if we lower the temperature and kind of cool him down and use his body like a big ice bag to surround the spinal cord, | |
| we might limit some of the inflammation and possibly protect some of the spinal cord tissue that may have a better chance of healing and restoring function because when we picked him up off the field, he had no feeling and no movement below his chin. | |
| Andy, in the show, we talked a little bit about the personal risk you took. | |
| For example, that you called your wife to make sure that, you know, if you lost the mortgage on the house and the tuition for the kids' school, she'd still love you. | |
| And she very endearingly told you to follow your conscience to do what's right, which is our Hippocratic Oath. | |
| And I really want to applaud you again for keeping that first and foremost in your mind. | |
| But I'm going to say, if I sprained my ankle, I put ice on it, right? | |
| We recommend that to our patients all the time. | |
| Why would the idea of putting ice on an injured spine be that controversial? | |
| I mean, we do it for the heart. | |
| We do it for the brain sometimes. | |
| It's something that is conventionally used in medicine and in practice. | |
| Why wouldn't it have already been studied in the spine? | |
| Well, I think the real problem is that the concept is not new. | |
| It's fairly older, but it was the way that we attacked it in the past when studies were done We cooled the spinal cord directly. | |
| We slid special catheters in. | |
| Of course, it took a long time to get the injured patient to a place where an epidural catheter, a catheter that lays right on the cord, could be utilized. | |
| The results weren't that good, I think, either from direct thermal injury to the cord or The fact that if you cool the cord selectively directly, you actually cause a vasoconstriction. | |
| We cause the blood supply to close down in that area by using too much cool, and that's not really what we want. | |
| So if we cool the whole body, we don't get any selective vasoconstriction or stopping of blood supply to the cord because part of the spinal cord injury, Mehmet, is not just direct blunt injury to the cord and not just direct swelling. | |
| But it's also ischemia, which means the blood supply gets cut off because of the pinching. | |
| So by utilizing the whole body and cooling the whole body, it's a trick. | |
| So the body doesn't know where to turn off or turn on blood supply. | |
| It's cool everywhere. | |
| So the blood supply selectively remains open. | |
| So we're shrinking the inflammation while feeding the cord a good blood supply. | |
| and the thought nowadays by using a systemic, not just directly cooling the cord with a special catheter that lays on the spinal cord, but using a special catheter that goes into the main body's circulation and cools the blood internally is that we can keep the blood supply going, we can lower the inflammation and spare as much spinal cord tissue as possible. | |
| Yeah, I was really impressed by that because I think that a lot of Americans believe that when When you break your neck, quote unquote, you're actually transecting. | |
| You're cutting the cord in half. | |
| Before I became a physician, that's what I thought. | |
| You know, Mehmet, you used a beautiful analogy, that is, of a celery stalk with the strings remaining intact. | |
| And that's really, I mean, describe that. | |
| Well, I think I stole that idea from Andy, actually, but at least it was his imagery that I transferred into a celery stalk because we couldn't find a better alternative. | |
| We actually went out to get glow sticks, Andy, which is your original concept, and we couldn't find glow sticks that broke the way they're supposed to break. | |
| So we used a celery stalk because I think if you take a celery stalk and you twist it so that it fractures, you'll notice that you do get a disconnection of the stalk a little bit, but there are little strains that hold the top and the bottom of the stalk together. | |
| Metaphorically, when you injure the spinal calm, that's what we're dealing with, right? | |
| You've got a couple cells that are alive. | |
| We don't know how many yet, but there are probably a couple, that if you can just keep them alive, just recruit a few extra cells to work, then you go from a guy who can't breathe to someone who can breathe, because now the level of paralysis is beneath the phrenic nerves, which power our diaphragms. | |
| Or it's maybe a little bit lower, so you're actually able to move your legs a little bit more than you could have. | |
| And that's what was so stunning about Kevin, when he walks, and he's an imposing figure, he's a pro football player, and he walks out onto the stage, and he's got some issues that he's dealing with still, but they're trivial compared to what you would have expected. | |
| In the press conference that you gave after the surgery, what was the number you quoted for the press? | |
| Well, about 10% chance that he would ever walk again, and statistically... | |
| In the spinal cord injury group, and like doctors, we try to classify everything. | |
| We have a classification system and a classification of his spinal column injury, which was the second worst, as worse as it can be. | |
| The only thing that would be worse, as you mentioned earlier, would be a spinal cord transection, and there would have been nothing we could do for him at that point or at this point in time. | |
| With his spinal cord injury, there was only about a 10, at the most, 15% chance that he was going to be a walker again. | |
| And he walked out there as, you know, bubbly and making his mother and his girlfriend proud. | |
| It was pretty impressive. | |
| Now, just to walk through the time course a little bit. | |
| So, you know, an hour, actually, I think it was about 13 minutes into the injury, there was an ambulance there. | |
| 20 minutes after that, getting into the ambulance, you were at the hospital. | |
| So 35 minutes or so after the injury, he's already at a pretty good medical center. | |
| You also made the big decision, I should tell the audience, of going to a different hospital than perhaps the one that you would have gone to that was closest because they had technology that you needed, in particular an MRI scanner, that you knew was manned all the time. | |
| And I bring this up to the audience because these are not subtle insights. | |
| These are hugely important because once you get to the hospital and find out the tech's not there for two more hours, you're really in trouble. | |
| And not only that, but the important point here, I mean, one of the important points is these are very difficult decisions for a doctor. | |
| I mean, he actually probably thought, well, this is the best thing for the patient and the risk is I'm going to lose my mortgage and I'm going to be penniless. | |
| It's a real fear for a lot of physicians. | |
| And he did what was right. | |
| I mean, what he did is the model. | |
| And I think one of the reasons you probably bonded with him so much is he did the model of what every physician should do. | |
| But in today's litiginous climate, it's a little risky. | |
| Got a lot more questions to go, but first, let's take a quick break. | |
| Before I get to the other big issue I wanted to bring up was the surgery. | |
| We're not used to having folks criticize us for doing our best. | |
| And I don't know, frankly, think that there's a lot of big criticism of you that I think is defensible, but there are people who came out and said you could have done things differently, which is true in any kind of politicized environment. | |
| How do you deal with that? | |
| Sure. | |
| Well, first of all, you know, it makes you uncomfortable when you think you've done your best and you're seeing a good job. | |
| Or a good result evolving, yet still your colleagues are criticizing you. | |
| You take it personally. | |
| But at the end of the day, for me personally, when I lay my head on the pillow and I think about my personal conversations with Kevin Everett, and I say, Kevin, are you happy with the job that I've done for you? | |
| And Kevin continually, obviously from the great work that he was doing on his own, told me that he was happy. | |
| I felt good. | |
| You know, I mean, there was a lot of banter in the literature. | |
| The New York Times article basically slaughtered me. | |
| Some of the popular press slaughtered me, but it wasn't my position at the time to answer back. | |
| I was protecting my patient's chart because, you know, there are laws that help us to protect them. | |
| So I kind of kept it quiet. | |
| I internalized a lot of that. | |
| But, you know, my wife, again, she's a good guiding force. | |
| And every night when I put my head on the pillow, my conscience was clear that I did the best job I could do. | |
| And as physicians, that's all that people can ask of us is stay current in your field, try to make good decisions, Make decisions that are based in the best interest of your patient and you're never going to go wrong. | |
| Do we get things right 100% of the time? | |
| Any doctor that tells you that he has no complications or he's right 100% of the time is not an honest physician and the only thing that can make us dangerous in our field is if we're not honest with ourselves and with our patients. | |
| So I feel pretty good about the job that I've done. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| You know, surgery is controlled arrogance. | |
| And I don't say it in a disdainful way. | |
| When we go to the operating room, we've got to be able to make very difficult decisions and not look back all the time. | |
| And it takes a certain amount of confidence. | |
| It's even more than confidence to be able to do that. | |
| And sometimes it doesn't help you in real life situations. | |
| So I think you took a very healthy perspective on this. | |
| In the last few minutes, let me go to the other point you brought up when I was visiting in Buffalo. | |
| I actually was not aware of this, but you pointed out that when someone has a fracture of the vertebral, the spine or the vertebral body, and in Kevin's case, he shoved the third vertebrae onto the fourth one. | |
| So you used a shingle analogy and sort of taught me that when these things slip, and I think they're called perched facets. | |
| Is that the right term? | |
| One was a dislocated and locked facet on the left side and the other was a perched facet on the right side. | |
| So when that happens, then you've got a dilemma because you've got to reconnect that, but you've got fractured bones which aren't going to protect the spine or cord anymore. | |
| So you pointed out that before you put the patient to sleep and they lose muscle tone, which is what holds the spinal cord intact, it doesn't allow the muscles to relax, which would then allow everything to collapse in the bones and crush the cord worse. | |
| You actually fixed the spine while he was awake. | |
| How do you do that? | |
| We do that by actually using a special halo system. | |
| You've seen pictures of guys with something drilled into their skull, bolted into their head like a halo, and we use this method while he's awake with a local anesthesia because he can still feel his head. | |
| We drill some bolts into the head and under x-ray control with a little bit of muscle relaxation, we gently Longitudinally, we stretch his neck back into position. | |
| It's called a closed reduction. | |
| There's no opening of the skin. | |
| We realign the bones of the spine and sometimes it takes weight up to 40 or 50 pounds to pull the neck out to length to overcome the muscle spasm that's there and realign the neck and we did that while he was awake and the reason that you do that while he's awake is because you don't want to over-distract it and Either tear the remaining spinal cord tissue or essentially tear the head right off the shoulders. | |
| So it's a careful process. | |
| That would be very anticlimactic to the care of the patient. | |
| Finally, there's the big emotional element. | |
| Obviously, you're going to the operating room. | |
| You've got to speak to the family. | |
| Tell us about that conversation. | |
| Yes, that was in what we call the pre-op holding area, which you know, but that's a small waiting area where the The patient, the player will meet the anesthesiologist, the OR circulating nurses, all the preparations for the operating room are made. | |
| And in that area, since things moved quickly for Kevin Everett, we needed to get a formal written consent. | |
| The hospitals will not allow you to bring a patient to the operating room until there's a consent written and signed. | |
| And in that light, because of the nature of Kevin's injury, I asked him who Next of kin was, and he said, I need to speak to my mom. | |
| And with my cell phone, we called his mother down in Texas, who was actually just returning home from a sports bar. | |
| She'd had a big family meeting, gathering of friends, because it was the first game of the season, and this was a breakout year for Kevin. | |
| He had a great camp. | |
| He was supposed to have the year of his career. | |
| And they were all gathered, and they saw him go down on the field, and I called his mom. | |
| And by this point, Kevin was resolute. | |
| We had discussed what needed to be done, what the chances were, what therapies we were using, and what their controversies were. | |
| And Kevin and I had a very frank conversation that I told him that, on my part, I would do everything in my power regardless of, you know, what my colleagues would say to help make him better. | |
| And his job was to work as hard as he could and be strong to get better. | |
| And he promised me if I did my job He'd do his, but he needed to speak to his mom. | |
| And it was a very strange conversation because he was overly concerned about her. | |
| And the first thing he said on the phone wasn't, Mom, I'm hurt, or Mom, I'm frightened. | |
| He said, Mom, I don't want you to be scared. | |
| I want you to take care of the girls. | |
| He's got three younger sisters. | |
| It was a very, for me, an almost overpowering conversation because she was crying when I told her I first engaged her on the phone. | |
| And I told her what the problem was and I told her he had a horrible injury to his neck and it was affecting his breathing and we needed to operate and he may never walk again. | |
| There was a good chance, a better chance that he wouldn't than he would. | |
| And she cried and she said, I need to speak to my baby. | |
| And then he tells her that he loves her. | |
| He doesn't want her to worry because he's going to get better. | |
| And he tells the girls that he loves them. | |
| And it was a very interesting conversation because of the kind of It was an interesting, powerful conversation that we had on that cell phone. | |
| Andy, Captain, I want to salute you and again applaud you for all the wonderful work you did with Kevin Everett, but also the way you made the profession proud. | |
| I think you've got all your key ethical issues lined up perfectly, which is, I suspect, one of the reasons that you're so popular with your family. | |
| Andy brought all of his... | |
| Well, not all of them. | |
| You brought, what, five of the kids to the show? | |
| I brought... | |
| Actually, four of our five were there. | |
| One was in Europe studying in Florence for the year. | |
| And one had exams at Ohio State and couldn't get away. | |
| I enjoyed meeting them and I enjoyed seeing their love for you. | |
| It's well deserved. | |
| There's lots more when we come back. | |
| We've got another miracle situation. | |
| It's a different kind of miracle to talk about. | |
| And I've asked Dr. Robert Johnson to join us today. | |
| Dr. Johnson is a hematologist, oncologist, and he has to deal with the reality that I face all the time as well. | |
| And that is the remarkable ability we have now in modern medicine to perform life-saving transplantation. | |
| But the inability for us to find donors, which therefore causes us to fail in our quest. | |
| And we did a little bit on transplantation by featuring Jason Ray. | |
| Jason had been the mascot for the North Carolina basketball team. | |
| He was killed in a terrible car accident when the team was on the road. | |
| And his family, who were understandably reluctant to donate the organs in this time of tragedy, had been told by their son that he wanted all of his organs donated everything. | |
| And so they abided by his wishes because they did not want to disappoint him even after his death. | |
| And so Jason Ray's organs were used to change the lives of 70 other human beings. | |
| And several of the lives that he saved by donating his heart and his kidneys and his pancreas and his liver were featured on an ESPN show. | |
| Lisa Salter was the reporter on that program that has been very popular. | |
| Because it does such a wonderful job of chronicling this young man's passion for life and how he passed life on in his death. | |
| And we had them on the show with Kevin Everett, again, just to talk about medical miracles. | |
| And I thought we'd have Dr. Johnson speak for a little time with us, talking about another individual who's actually today still looking for a donor, still looking for help. | |
| Dr. Johnson, thanks for joining us. | |
| Well, thank you very much. | |
| It's a pleasure and a privilege to speak with you today, Mehmet. | |
| Bob, tell me a little bit about Nicole Nelson. | |
| What's her problem? | |
| How has the field advanced? | |
| And what's the need you have from our audience? | |
| Because I'm hoping that some of the listeners today will resonate to this story and might be able to help you out. | |
| Well, I appreciate that. | |
| I just want to add one thing before we get started, and that is my specialty is internal medicine rather than hematology. | |
| And internal medicine deals with all the medical illnesses, so we don't come across plastic anemia as much as a hematologist, but Nicole Nelson is a physician assistant that works with me in our hospital in Concord, New Hampshire. | |
| And she became ill last fall and was diagnosed by her physician following a bone marrow biopsy with a diagnosis of aplastic anemia. | |
| Now, this illness consists of a failure of a bone marrow to produce three main cell types that keep us alive, and one is red cells. | |
| That carry oxygen to all of our organs, and secondly is the white cells that help us to fight infection, and thirdly, platelets, which help us to clot our blood. | |
| Her bone marrow is failing to produce all of those cellular elements, and that is a fatal illness. | |
| Now, Nicole is 35 years old. | |
| She's a new mother. | |
| She has a 14-month-old daughter, a new house. | |
| Happily married, five years. | |
| And to have this diagnosis, I mean, clearly her whole life is just pulled right out from underneath her. | |
| And your listeners can just imagine themselves in that situation if that happened to them or... | |
| Well, now tell me what the problem is, if you will, from why don't we have more donors and what's the problem for her in getting a typing? | |
| Her hematologist has run her tissue types to look for a match for her to have a bone marrow transplant to save her life. | |
| And they have not been able to find a match. | |
| And the main reason is because of her ethnic background. | |
| She's part Native American Indian. | |
| Unfortunately, nationally, there's a serious deficiency of that group and all Minorities on the National Donor Registry. | |
| So that anyone who has that ethnic background, if they go to try and find a match, they're at a great disadvantage because there aren't enough people with a similar background available as a donor. | |
| So right now I think there's about or almost 7 million donors available on the National Registry and she didn't match anyone. | |
| But Bob, now, how do we get more people registered? | |
| Seven million is... | |
| This is Mike Roizen, by the way. | |
| Seven million is just under three percent of the total in the country. | |
| Seems to me there really isn't any hazard, is there, with bone marrow transplantation for the donor? | |
| Not at all. | |
| Not at all. | |
| And so why can't we get 200 million people in this pool? | |
| That's what we need. | |
| And we need the minorities to come forward, too. | |
| And the problem is... | |
| First of all, there's not really awareness of the problem by the country. | |
| This is not something that we all think about. | |
| We think in terms of blood donations and things like that, but none of us really think in terms of, well, I could be screened for a marrow donation. | |
| And it's so easy, because all you really need is a swab of your cheek to be tested. | |
| You don't have to have blood drawn. | |
| It's just a simple swab of your cheek. | |
| Now, is there any... | |
| I know there's no hazard, if you will, but... | |
| There's no pain. | |
| It's pretty easy to do. | |
| Is there any limitation? | |
| Are there diseases that preclude you from giving, Merrill? | |
| Well, there are a list of illnesses that would preclude you. | |
| You need to be between the ages of 18 and 60. So if age is concerned, you can't have a diagnosis of cancer or diabetes or certain blood disorders or bleeding disorders. | |
| You know, your listeners could obtain a lot of information on, one, how to become a Marrow donor by going to a website that the National Registry has, that's Marrow, M-A-R-R-O-W,.org, and signing on to that website, and it explains everything. | |
| You can click on Join, enter your zip code, And a distance and determine where the nearest bone marrow drive is in your area. | |
| Can you give that website again? | |
| It's marrowdonation.com or.org? | |
| Actually, it's just marrow.org and it's spelled M-A-R-R-O-W dot O-R-G. So it's marrow, M-A-R-R-O-W dot O-R-G. And that is the website for the National Registry. | |
| They have a lot of information there for everyone as far as how to become a donor, information about becoming a donor, registering. | |
| And if people don't feel that they're able to become a donor because of age or illnesses, there's other opportunities to help the Foundation by donations, volunteering, or even organizing drives themselves. | |
| Now, I signed something on my driver's license that lets my organs be taken, but that's different than this. | |
| So this is a separate registry, is that correct? | |
| It is separate. | |
| I have the same thing on my license, but until this really came about, I've given blood in the past, but I had never been screened as a volunteer marrow donor until now. | |
| So I've now gone through the process, and it's so easy to do. | |
| And the important thing is that when you do this, you volunteer to help anyone out there who needs that bone marrow to save their life. | |
| And there may be only one person out there that can do it, and that may be Nicole's case. | |
| So that, for example, if someone out there needs my tissue type and bone marrow, I'm here for them. | |
| And I'll donate it. | |
| And everyone on that registry feels exactly the same way. | |
| Bob, if you look at the percentage of success from using this registry, it's somewhere between 60% and 75% from what I can tell. | |
| So most people who need a bone marrow transplant will find a match. | |
| I am intrigued, and Dr. Rosen brought this up as well, that we have so few people registered. | |
| This is so easy to do. | |
| In theory, we should probably be up in the high 90s. | |
| Do you know in other countries if these programs have been able to get levels of success that high? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| I don't think so. | |
| I think the number of donors that are registered are much higher in the United States. | |
| But the problem with our registry is it's so underrepresented by minorities. | |
| And that's the main problem. | |
| We need to have them turn out to be screened so that we can help everyone of their same ethnic background because your tissue type is inherited. | |
| And, I mean, you're most likely to find a match of somebody with the same race or ethnicity. | |
| So unless you have enough donors out there who have been screened, your chances to find somebody with a particular background like her Native American background is slim unless you can get more people with that background to be tested. | |
| Let me ask you, with other solid organs, we don't have to be quite such perfectionists in our matches, right? | |
| For the heart, I just match the major blood type, A, A, U, B, A, B, O, and I'm done. | |
| I don't have to go into more detail. | |
| Why is it so important for bone marrow recipients to have a perfect match from a donor? | |
| The problem is one of rejection, unless there is an excellent match. | |
| And if there's any difference from your own tissue type, The chances of rejection are much higher. | |
| Now, the patient who's being treated has to go through a process of chemotherapy and medications to knock out their immune system so they don't reject the transplant. | |
| But that's why it has to be so specific, because unless it is almost identical, you will reject it. | |
| Alright, so let me go through some myths here, if you could, because I think it'll be helpful for the audience. | |
| And by the way, on Oprah.com, we have a map of the country, and you can click on your state. | |
| And you can get an organ donation form. | |
| It's not just for bone marrow, but it allows you to have a document that you can give to your loved ones. | |
| Because sometimes, even in death, obviously you can save major organs, but the bone marrow itself can be used often. | |
| As well, and it's hugely beneficial for folks who are in crisis. | |
| So myth number one. | |
| Bone marrow donation is painful, right? | |
| You've got to take a piece of the hip bone to do it. | |
| Is that what it's about? | |
| No. | |
| No, that's true. | |
| And they don't take a piece of bone, and it's not painful. | |
| They give you an anesthetic so that you don't feel anything. | |
| So that is a myth. | |
| There is no pain involved. | |
| Myth number two, all marrow donations involve surgery. | |
| It's a significant procedure and it's a lengthy healing process. | |
| It's a surgical procedure, but it is one that's done under an anesthetic, so there's no pain. | |
| It's not a major operation, so it's simple to do. | |
| It's simple to donate. | |
| And what's the recovery process like? | |
| The recovery process is very quick, and there may be some fatigue, some mild discomfort, but those symptoms usually pass within a few days. | |
| All right, and the third big myth that I always hear is that the donation of your marrow will weaken you, that it's difficult for you to regenerate what you've donated to someone who's suffering and needs a bone marrow transplant. | |
| And that's not the case, Mem, because, you know, really you replace everything they take out within four to six weeks so that you're usually back to your usual routine in a few days, so that's not a problem. | |
| So let's go back to Nicole for one second, if I could, Bob. | |
| You're charged with taking care of her. | |
| Obviously, you've had the honor of working with her since she was a physician assistant in your hospital. | |
| How long can she wait before she gets an appropriate donor? | |
| What's her time horizon? | |
| Well, the problem is that with her illness, she's being kept alive by blood transfusions and platelet transfusions. | |
| The more transfusions, the more times you receive those things, the higher your likelihood is of rejecting a transplant in the future. | |
| So they try to minimize those things. | |
| So it really gives her a limited amount of time, and she's really up against it right now. | |
| I mean, she's running out of time. | |
| And that's really the urgency of her story. | |
| That's why we're hoping that people understand that it is so easy to be screened with just a swab of the cheek and that when they hear her story and her plea that they're going to want to help and they're going to want to check on the Marrow.org and find out how they can become a bone marrow donor. | |
| And I just want to emphasize that for minorities, the screening for bone marrow transplantation is absolutely free. | |
| Dr. Robert Johnson, thank you so much for joining us today. | |
| You're an internist at New Hampshire. | |
| You actually graduated from Jefferson Medical College, where my father taught for many years. | |
| And it's been a great honor to have you on. | |
| Thank you so much for sharing Nicole Nelson's story with us. | |
| And please wish this wonderful physician's assistant the best of luck, and I'm hoping folks out there will hear her story and respond with the same passion that Dr. Roizen and I felt when we first heard about her. | |
| I wish you the best. |