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Priest's Selfless Gift of Stem Cells Saved Kentucky Woman
Byron Crawford
The Courier-Journal Louisville, KY
14 June 2006
"Really, what words can you say other than, 'You saved my life?'"
Lee Ann Sandusky Collins of Columbia was in momentary shock when a Missouri Catholic priest her once-anonymous donor of life-saving stem cells made a surprise visit to the Adair County Relay for Cancer last Friday night.
It was a joyful chapter in what has been Collins' frightening battle with acute myelogenous leukemia.
"I woke up Dec. 10, 2001, with a sore throat, and the next Monday morning I found myself receiving chemotherapy to treat cancer," the 42-year old bank compliance officer recalled. "Mostly, I was more worried about my kids. At that time my daughter was in fifth grade and my son was a freshman in high school."
Within 16 months of her diagnosis, Collins had gone through eight months of chemotherapy, weeks of hospitalization and two relapses. Her last hope was a stem-cell transplant if a donor match could be found and even then her chance of survival would be no more than 20 percent.
No matches were found among family members, but a search of the Heart of America National Marrow Donor Program registry yielded a potential match.
Neither Collins nor the donor could be given any information about each other until one year after the transplant was completed at University Hospital in Louisville .
"I called one year to the day of my transplant and said, 'I want to know who my donor is,'" Collins remembered.
‹b›From darkness to light
She soon spoke by phone with the Rev. Ken Riley, pastor of St. Bernadette Catholic Church in Kansas City, Mo. , whose July 2003 donation of stem cells had changed her blood type from A positive to A negative and transformed her outlook for survival from dim to extremely bright.
Riley, 40, who had donated bone marrow in 1996 for a man in Indiana, had placed his name on the donor registry a few years earlier when a second-grader at a previous parish was suffering from leukemia. His own father is alive today, Riley said, because of a kidney transplant from a brother and a pancreas received from another donor.
"I'm a big proponent of organ and tissue donations," he said. "When people in the media and other places say that the Catholic Church is anti-stem cell that's not true at all. We're certainly protecting the embryonic stem-cell life for stem-cell donations, but otherwise it's wonderful."
Nearly two months ago, Peggy Lawson of the Columbia Relay for Life Committee invited Riley to surprise Lee Ann Collins during an awards presentation at this year's Relay for Life. Collins' employer, First National Bank of Columbia, paid for the flight.
"Lee Ann served on the committee, but they kept it from her as did the whole town. It was kind of fun," Riley said.
At last year's event, Collins had thanked all the doctors who had helped save her life Thomas Baeker, Roger and Geoffrey Herzig, and A.G. Herrera Jr. She had hoped to travel to Missouri to thank Father Riley.
"I turn around and he's walking up on the stage," she said. "My chin dropped. ... It was wonderful."
After hugs, tears and Riley's remarks to the crowd of about 400, Collins introduced him to her husband and children and invited him to their home.
"He'd always been interested in knowing about the whole family and had prayed the whole time for all of us, but had not seen them," she said. "I took him to the airport in Nashville the next morning so we had time to talk. I said that people who get on these donor lists don't realize what they may be doing for someone.
"He basically saved a family; saved children from having to grow up without their mother."
You can reach Byron Crawford at (502) 582-4791 or e-mail him at bcrawford@courier-journal.com. You can also read his columns at <http://www.courier-journal.com>www.courier-journal.com .
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