news houghton lake resorter, april 14, 2011 • a7 rendon...
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Newswww.houghtonlakeresorter.com Houghton Lake Resorter, April 14, 2011 • A7
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By Cheryl Holladaycheryl.holladay@
houghtonlakeresorter.comIt is fitting that the theme of this
year’s Relay for Life Roscommon County is “Christmas in July” because it was Christmas time a few years ago that cancer survivor Daire Rendon learned that she received a second chance at life.
Mrs. Rendon, the wife of Rep. Bruce Rendon (R-Lake City), hopes to attend the 24-hour Relay, set for July 9-10, if she is able. She’ll be busy helping with preparations for her daughter, Miranda’s wedding in Au-gust. (The Rendons also have another daughter, Samantha Pena, who lives in Mexico).
Almost five years ago, Mrs. Ren-don was diagnosed with Burkitt’s lym-phoma – one of the most aggressive types of lymphoma (blood cancer). She knows first-hand what it means to be sick. Really sick.
Getting diagnosedIn September of 2006, Mrs. Ren-
don, now 58, was noticing some things.
“I gained weight, all in my stom-ach. My back started aching,” she said. She attributed her symptoms to a pos-sible kidney problem. “I couldn’t sit.”
When she went to a walk-in clinic, she was immediately sent to the emer-gency room in Cadillac. At first doc-tors thought her problem was ovarian cancer. She received morphine that night. The ER doctor sent her to Grand Rapids to see a specialist for the re-moval of a tumor.
But her problem was not simply a tumor that could easily be removed.
“It was everywhere,” Mrs. Rendon said of the cancer – below her dia-phragm and wrapped around her intes-tines, uterus and other organs.
Over the course of the next sev-eral months she was in and out of the hospital. Her arduous path to recovery would involve more than chemother-apy – which itself ravaged her body – it involved searching for a stem cell transplant.
Mrs. Rendon said her doctors could have kept treating her lymphoma with chemo, but by May, 2007, she sat down for an adult stem cell consultation and underwent a variety of tests.
Stem cells from bone marrow have been used to treat leukemia and other types of cancer. In successful trans-plants, the stem cells migrate into the patient’s bone marrow and produce new, healthy white blood cells.
But before she could take the next step she needed to be “as cancer-free as possible,” she said.
Admitted to Karmanos Cancer In-stitute (on the grounds of the Detroit Medical Center), she stayed on the transplant floor, which maintains a controlled environment. She related it to the 1976 movie, “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” starring John Travol-ta.
She received intense chemother-apy. During the 10-day stay she lost 25 pounds and suffered from thrush (a yeast infection that can develop in the mouth and throat).
“They bombard you with this chemo,” she said, so the body is an “open vessel” ready for new stem cells. “You’re exhausted. It’s pretty nasty,” she said. “It kill(s) your old system and you’re building a new one.”
Cure from around the worldHer next hurdle to jump was find-
ing an adult stem cell donor.Because Mrs. Rendon has some
Native American ancestry, that made finding a match more difficult (no one in her family was a match). However, three matches were found through an international computer database and the best was chosen for her.
Her stem cell donor ended up being from Stuttgart, Germany, and the blood was transported overseas to Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Because it is the donor’s choice whether or not to meet the recipient, all she knew about her donor was that his name was Oliver. She ended up using one of two pints of stem cell-rich blood he donated and kept one “just in case.”
“There is a big need to find do-nors,” she said. “It really is an easy thing to do.”
It’s a matter of filling out a Red Cross form and having blood drawn
for submission to a testing bank to type it for genetic markers.
Extracting adult stem cells used to involve removing them from the bone marrow of a donor with a needle. Now, doctors use a drug called Neupogen to ratchet up the production of stem cells of the donor. The process of using a donor is called allogeneic transplant.
“It produces a voluminous amount of stem cells,” Mrs. Rendon said, add-ing it is more humane.
She pointed out that because ev-eryone makes stem cells, patients with non-blood cancers can also use Ne-upogen to stimulate growth of their own stem cells. Such patients can have their own bone marrow extract-ed before chemotherapy. The process is called autologous transplant. The method provides for easier recovery, she said, because the body is not ac-cepting a foreign host.
After the transplant, Mrs. Rendon said she still needed blood transfusions every 10 days to two weeks because her hemoglobin would get low. She also had to contend with the fact that her donor had a different blood type.
Then one day, after about six months following the transplant, her prospects changed. The day after Christmas, 2007, her nurse, looking at results from her most recent blood test, told her she had a new blood type. Hers used to be O positive. Now it is A positive.
“I said ‘thank you, Jesus,’” she said. “I was really one of the lucky ones.”
A new beginningMrs. Rendon’s adult stem cell
transplant is considered by her doctors to be a success. It also relieved her of an autoimmune disease she had previ-ously, Crohn’s disease.
She said she is considered cured.“It’s a new beginning,” she said,
understanding that nothing is certain in this world.
“You don’t know what life is gonna bring down the road,” she said. “I’ve certainly been blessed.”
The method that provided her cure is one she believes in. She said she would not have chosen such a cure if it involved using embryonic stem cells.
“It was a gift that was freely given,” she said. “It wasn’t something that was taken or created...We don’t have to take [stem cells] from embryos.”
The issue, she said, has “become a political football.” As a right to life promoter, she said, she believes that when society opens the door to embry-
onic stem cell research, it allows em-bryos “to be used for other things.”
She is living testimony that adult stem cell transplants work.
“We all have the opportunity of life,” she said. “These human bodies [are capable of] more than we know..You can get your life back.”
Donating bone marrow “means so much,” she said. “It is a gift we can choose to give.”
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Food News
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A7
Rendon cancer cure result of adult stem cells
Thursday Night Mens LeagueMens League Meeting will be Held
@ The Club HouseApril 21st, 6pm
Openings are Available
989-366-77264761 W. Houghton Lake Dr. Houghton Lake, MI 48629
www.PineViewHighlands.com
Daire Rendon, Lake City (Missau-kee County), has chaired Relay for Life events in her county in the past. Even though no one in her family at that time had cancer, she was aware of the high rate of cancer in her community and un-derstands the need to support the Ameri-can Cancer Society.
“It touches each and every one of us,” she said. “We’re all connected.”
She said her husband, Rep. Bruce Rendon (R-Lake City), was by her side throughout her own cancer ordeal.
“It’s never a fight that you do alone,” she said.
She may never understand the rea-
sons she had cancer, she said, but she believes it was better for her to have to endure it than someone else.
“Better me than a child,” she said.Rendon hopes to attend the Relay for
Life event in Roscommon County if she is able. Set for July 9-10 at Houghton Lake High School, this year’s Relay will feature the theme, “Christmas in July.”
For information or to form a team call Chairman BJ VanWormer at (989) 387-6799 or Team Development Chairs Judith and Steve Pittman at 202-2384 or e-mail [email protected].
Rendon hopes to attend Relay for Life Roscommon County
Daire Rendon