Thursday, June 18, 2009

Help save a life

This is a story about a wonderful young lady named Ashlyn. She and many others across the country are in desparate need of a bone marrow transplant. This is her story, and after the story, I will tell you how you can get involved and help.
Ashlyn Glass has always been a healthy child. She has always been active, her love is dancing which consumes many hours a week. So when we started seeing red dots on the lower half of her legs we thought it was razor burn or maybe an infection due to her dance tights.
When the dots weren’t fading away as they had in the past, and in fact were getting worse, it was time to see a doctor. Our family doctor immediately ran blood work which showed that her platelets were down to 25,000. Platelets for a normal teenage girl should be around 140,000 at their lowest. Our doctor put us in contact with a hematologist who immediately took a bone marrow sample and a bone biopsy that same day.
Thankfully the biopsy eliminated the fear that this could be leukemia, but opened up the door to a number of other possible diseases. A week later, and after Ashlyn’s first platelet transfusion, she was diagnosed with Aplastic Anemia, a rare and serious disease that can happen at any age, but is more common in younger people. Ashlyn is just 14, a freshman in high school.
Aplastic Anemia is a condition where your immune system has gone haywire and your bone marrow stops producing enough new blood cells. Because of this disease, Ashlyn cannot participate in dance, can’t ride her bike, go to water parks, and has a higher risk of getting an infection -- which can be life threatening.
The cure for this disease is a bone marrow or cord marrow transplant. Her immediate family members are not a match, so she must turn to the alternative Immunosuppressant drugs. Some patients have shown signs that the disease will go into remission after one or two rounds of treatment, but many times this fails and the only possibility is a bone marrow transplant.
While Ashlyn waits her first round of treatment we “maintain” with platelet or whole blood transfusions which only last about a week. We hope that the treatment will work for her, if not we pray that there is a match in the National Bone Marrow Registry so our little girl can continue on with her life.

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