By the time she got home, her thighs and calves were mottled with bruises.
“It will go away,” she assured her dad.
Soon her vision was marred by spots, and the two-block walk to her job became exhausting.
She tried not to worry.
That’s how Anna Robinson discovered she had leukemia.
Within days, a bone marrow biopsy revealed the grim details.
Robinson had an aggressive cancer called acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
“I thought I’d wake up and it would all be a dream,” Robinson remembers.
Days earlier, she’d been packing to start her senior year of college.
Now she was in a fog of chemotherapy, receiving repeated blood transfusionsand facing her own mortality.
There was but one ray of hope, she was told: a bone marrow transplant.
Say the wordsbone marrow transplantto anyone and the first reaction is probably a wince.
The donation may be relatively simple, but the science behind a bone marrow transplant is rigorous.
(A list of the 200 participating U.S. hospitals is available atwww.bethematch.org/cord.)
She had been all set to represent her sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, by giving a pint.
But a finger prick revealed that her iron was too low to qualify.
What is it?"
asked Quinn, athletic and vivacious, with smiling brown eyes.
“I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” Quinn says now, laughing.
Quinn was taken aback.
Despite studying nursing, she knew little about bone marrow donation.
“I knew the chances of having a match were pretty slim,” she reflects.
But before long, her phone rang again; the DKMS donor request manager was on the line.
“You are a match,” she said.
She was crying by the time she hung up, overwhelmed by the awesome responsibility she’d been handed.
“It was up to me.
Some other person’s fate rested on me,” she remembers.
She spent that evening tearfully talking it over with her three housemates.
She happened to be in the middle of her most challenging semester of school and intensely strapped for time.
But most of all, she felt surprisingly uncertain about giving a piece of herself to a complete stranger.
“That was definitely the most surreal thing to me: Who is this person?”
It’s all unknown."
It’s heartbreaking for everyone."
Quinn called her parents in Chillicothe, Missouri, that night.
“This isn’t about you, Katie.
It’s about this other girl,” her father said.
“Afterward, I realized there was no way I could have said no,” Quinn admits.
“I don’t know why I was even weighing the pros and cons.
This was the only choice.”
The moment Quinn made her decision, her inner tumult lifted.
She was dry-eyed and confident as she dialed the DKMS office the next morning.
“Sign me up!”
she exclaimed, surprised at her own excitement.
“What do I do next?”
The 15 monthssince Robinson’s diagnosis had been brutal.
Ever practical, she asked her family not to discuss her chances of survival.
A second punishing round of chemo and radiation had been necessary before the disease was temporarily beaten back.
Then, eight months after the transplant, Robinson relapsed.
When Robinson’s doctors submitted an urgent request for a new donor, the odds seemed poor.
Yet the registry located someone with unexpected swiftness.
“They told me, ‘We have a donor who is a 20-year-old female,’ " she remembers.
“I was very lucky.”
Shewasluckyand in more ways than one.
Robinson also lives near a world-class transplant center.
“There are so many barriers to treatment,” Dr. Chell explains.
“I’ve done this before; I can do this again,” Robinson told her mother.
Her doctors administered antibiotics, in case a wayward germ entered her hospital room.
All they could do was wait.
As she settled into bed, her mother, Judy Quinn, pulled up a chair beside her.
Quinn looked away as the needle pierced her skin.
“I’m a nurse, and I deal with needles all the time,” she says sheepishly.
“I just don’t want to see one in me!”
It had been a busy week.
By day two, the marrow of her pelvic bones ached from the increased effort.
“My back and thighs felt sore, like I’d worked out really hard,” she says.
A predonation physical exam at St. Louis University Hospital had meant a four-hour round-trip drive from campus.
And there’d been one more wrinkle: her 21st birthday.
The rest of her blood returned to her body through the tube in her left hand.
“It didn’t hurt.
I didn’t feel a thing,” she says.
Conversely, clinical trials have found that adult recipients recover quicker with peripheral stem cells.
Ultimately, studies have found little difference in outcomes for adult cancer patients.
For Quinn, the toughest part of donating was holding perfectly still for five hours.
She felt a little light-headed but otherwise fine.
In fact, because her mom was wary of city driving, Quinn drove them home.
A transporter whisked the bag of cells away in a cooler and boarded a commercial flight heading west.
Anna herself was half asleep from her meds.
By 4 a.m., the bag was drained.
Robinson didn’t need to wait long to find out the results.
After one more round of chemo and immunotherapy using Quinn’s white blood cells, she was cancer-free.
But this was different,” she says.
“You know how people cut their palms and put them together?
It’s like we’re blood sisters.
We have the same blood, that kind of special bond.”
It got her thinking: She’d really like to meet this person.
Robinson emerged tentatively from the elevator, pale and frail.
“I don’t know what I’m going to say to Katie yet,” she said softly.
“It’s hard to say, ‘Thank you for being so selfless.’
There really are no words to thank her for what she’s done.”
From across the room, the women spotted each other and uncertainly approached.
They smiled shyly and then wrapped their arms around each other, Quinn towering over Robinson.
“It’s so to nice meetyou,“Quinn responded.
She couldn’t stop grinning.
“It means Katie’s cells are looking at every organ in my body,” Robinson explains.
“They’re sort of cleaning out any cancer cells.
“Anna is courageousa remarkable person, to say the least,” Dr. Estey says.
“you’re free to’t underestimate the ordeal she’s still going through.
But she has done a great job in dealing with it.”
Her health forecast is uncertain.
Anna still refuses to ask about her five-year survival odds but knows relapse is always a possibility.
(“I’m hesitant to say Ihadleukemia,” she says.)
She runs the risk of developing secondary cancers later in life, due to her chemotherapy and radiation.
But she remains as optimistic as ever.
In the studio, Anna Robinson presented Katie Quinn with a black velvet box wrapped in white ribbon.
“I have your cells to remember you by,” she said.
“I wanted to give you something to remember me by.”
She looked on bashfully as Quinn pulled off the ribbon and opened the box.
Photo Credit: Larsen&Talbert
