Register to save a life

BY RAFFY BOUDJIKANIAN

raffy.boudjikanian@transcontinental.ca

When Pierrefonds resident Emru Townsend's mother learned he had been diagnosed with an advanced form of leukemia at the end of 2007, she dropped other family business in Jamaica and came to be at his side, watching over him day and night for two weeks during his stay at the hospital.

"It's absolutely been amazing," said Townsend, 38, of the support he has received from his family and friends. An editor, freelance writer and web designer, Townsend is particularly well-known in the film animation industry, both in Montreal and abroad. Though his plight has been passed on in e-mail chains and posted on friends' blogs and websites, nobody has been able to help him yet.

That is because he suffers from acute myelogenous leukemia, and a condition known as monosomy 7. "It damages your chromosomes and increases the chances of leukemia occurring again," said Townsend. Though chemotherapy helps, the only viable solution to save his life is a bone marrow transplant.

"There is a very good technique to take care of such cases," said Townsend, his voice booming with positive energy. It would be difficult to guess the husband and father has recently left a three-month stay at a hospital just by listening to him.

For Townsend and others like him, cancerous stem cells have corrupted all of their bone marrow. It must be taken out and replaced with a sample from somebody else's, according to Susan Miller, an anatomy and cell biology professor at McGill University. "You can hopefully get a person that's histocompatible," she said, meaning the recipient's body will not reject the donor's bone marrow.

Townsend's sister Tamu, 36, jumped at the chance to save his brother as soon as she heard what he would need. "I was already mad that he would even think of asking the question," she said with a laugh. Unfortunately, Tamu wound up not matching his brother, so they are not out of the woods yet.

Diane Roy of Héma Québec said there are one in four chances that someone can be a match for their sibling. When this does not work, the person needing a bone marrow transplant can start looking in the bone marrow registry, which lists all potential donors that have given their consent to donate. It is tied to other bone marrow registries in Canada, which are linked with others across the world.

The problem seems to be a lack of awareness. "Héma Québec is a little bit like a bank. If you don't put anything into it, you don’t get anything out of it," said Roy, conceding that there has not been much advertising effort spent on bone marrow registries by the organization in the past. "We're working on it," she said.

That news was welcomed by Tamu, who said it can be very time-consuming and hard for families that are already exhausted by taking care of sick relatives to do advertising work, too. "There's not a lot of exposure. People aren't aware of it," she said.

There are around 35,000 potential bone marrow donors registered in Quebec, and 225,000 in Canada, according to Roy. For the Townsends, the situation is all the more difficult, because the proportion of registered minorities is even lower.

"It doesn’t' matter if you're a sibling or from the same race to be histocompatible," said Miller, but she added chances are higher for people of the same race. The Townsends are Afro-Caribbean blacks, underrepresented in the registry.

"Ninety-five per cent of those registered in Quebec are white," Roy said.

She said numbers are dropping in Canada. Even though 10,000 names were added to the registry last year, 9,000 were removed because potential donors became too old. "You have to be 18 to 50 years old and in good health to register," Roy said.

For those wishing to make the jump who are afraid of the pain a bone marrow transplant might cause, both Roy and Miller said the procedure is painless.

In Quebec, a blood sample is required to retrieve your bone marrow type. The first step is to call Héma Quebec or go on their website to fill out a consent form. The organization will then inform you when there is a blood drive near your area of residence. Once your bone marrow type is registered, you will be informed if there is a match.

"They anaesthetize the area (they will take your marrow from)," explained Miller, "so you don't feel anything at all." Usually this happens to be the side of your pelvis bone near one of your hips, she said.

"For the next few days, you might have a little sore, like if you had a bruise," she said. "The only thing you have to be worried about is to get the day off from work for the operation," she quipped.

"I think that everybody, whether they are going to match somebody or not, needs to register," said Tamu. Since she started a Facebook group and a website to help spread the word about her brother, she has been shocked by the amount of people who have contacted her about similar stories of needing to find a bone marrow match. "When Emru's match is found, we're going to keep talking about this," she said.

Emru Townsend is not letting himself be pinned to bed while waiting for that to happen. Though he said he would be spending some more time at the hospital, he has returned to work. "I actually have an article to finish for tomorrow," he told The Chronicle last Thursday.

Visit Héma Québec's website at www.hema-quebec.qc.ca or call 514-832-5000.