Family: Bone marrow match found for adopted Chinese girl ( 2003-11-16 10:58) (Agencies)
Kailee
Wells
The family of a 6-year-old adopted Chinese
girl who desperately needs a bone marrow transplant believes they have found a
match in China.
Kailee Wells suffers from severe aplastic anemia, which prevents bone marrow
from producing new blood cells. She has taken courses of chemotherapy but has
shown little sign of remission.
The best help for such patients is a transplant of healthy marrow or blood
stem cells from a suitable donor. Certain tissue traits of the patient and donor
must match.
Kailee's mother, Linda Wells, made her second trip to China earlier this
month to find a donor. Her husband, Owen Wells, said Saturday that his wife
believes doctors there have found a match.
"For these last 22 months, we've been living in fear that Kailee would take a
turn for the worse and there would be nothing we could do about it," he told
Albuquerque television station KOAT. "Now we have something we can use and save
our little girl. We are just about ready to start jumping up and down and
rejoicing."
Wells said a Chinese girl who is about a year old has a cord blood sample
that matches Kailee's perfectly. The next step, he said, would be to make sure
the sample is safely harvested and protected for transplant, the details of
which have yet to be worked out.
Owen Wells said his wife had been giving him updates about the match over the
phone and via email for the last eight hours.
Linda Wells first traveled to China in February to try to locate the girl's
birth mother since relatives are most likely to be a match. But she found no
relatives and decided to try again this month.
"This gives us so much motivation because now we found what we thought we
would never be able to find for Kailee," Owen Wells said. "We're going to
continue our world donor drive to try to continue to help as many people as we
possibly can. We're just so happy."
