Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 14, 1995 TAG: 9511140048
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SALLY HARRIS SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
In late October, she started back to work part time, the ordeal of the transplant over and the waiting game beginning.
If she is all right in two years, she feels she will be OK. In five, if she remains free of the disease, she will be pronounced cured. For right now, she says, "so far, so good."
After a cross-country automobile trip with her father in April, Miller went into the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle. After radiation and chemotherapy, she began receiving the bone marrow on the night of April 25. Her transplant ended six hours later.
The marrow, flown straight from a donor in Norway via the Concorde, was in pint bags like the ones in which blood is stored. The transplant took three pints of marrow.
While in the hospital, Miller walked about a mile each day around the nurses' station to keep her muscles in shape. "I told Dad he had to make me [walk], and he did," she said.
The first week in May, "I was real sick," she said. But as her white blood cells started coming back, she felt better. She left the hospital May 23 for a Seattle apartment her family had rented before she left Virginia.
As an outpatient, she could go to the mall on less-crowded days, take short trips such as an afternoon drive to Mt. Rainier National Park, and participate in hospital-sponsored activities such as a boat ride on Lake Washington with other patients. She went to the hospital three times a week for tests, which might show she needed more potassium or more magnesium, and a few times she had blood transfusions to keep her red cells and platelets from falling too low. Mostly, she read - a book a day - to relieve the boredom.
On July 11, she had to go back into the hospital: She had chickenpox. She was discharged again July 15.
During her stay in Seattle, volunteers made life easier. The volunteers assigned to her were from Virginia, and they showed her around the city, visited her in the hospital, invited her to dinner after the transplant was completed.
Her whole family also made her stay more bearable. The day after she got out of the hospital, her mother, Cora, son, Josh, and younger brother, Ross, arrived. Her older brother, Phillip, also visited while she was there. Her mother, father and son stayed with her until July 29, when she and her father flew home and her mother, son and Aunt Jennie, who had come a few days before, drove home.
During her first few weeks at home, her endurance, stamina, and concentration levels were low. She shook from the medication and had trouble writing a check or completing a conversation. Some days, she could do nothing more than lie on the sofa. Now, she has "more good days than bad days," according to her mother. Her hair, which she lost during treatment, is now more than an inch long.
And on the most important factor, she is doing well: "My blood counts have been normal, or close, about five weeks," she said.
She urges people to sign up for the bone-marrow registry and will participate in a drive in Radford by talking with the Radford Community Hospital Auxiliary about the transplant process so members can better inform potential donors.
"More people are being diagnosed all the time," she said. While she was in Seattle, there was another person from Virginia, as well as people from Ohio, Kentucky, New Jersey and North Carolina.
Miller is grateful to the donor in Norway, who was kind enough to do such a thing for a stranger in another country, and looks forward to contacting him at the end of a year. She is grateful to her family, church members and community members who have been supportive.
But it's for her father, Walter Miller, that she reserves the greatest thanks. "He went with me and stayed in the hospital every night. And when you're sick and out there, you're really sick. He was the one who held my hand and rubbed my back and told me I was going to make it. I had a couple of days I said I wasn't, and he wouldn't let me talk like that. Dad had to see me at my worst."
Miller is willing to talk to anyone else facing the same procedure. Write her at P.O. Box 553, Radford, Va., or call her at 731-4206.
"If you keep positive thinking, it will be better," she said.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***