Happiness: A Memoir: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After by Heather Harpham

Author:Heather Harpham [Harpham, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, women
ISBN: 9781250131577
Google: YjPeDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Published: 2017-08-01T00:02:17.536528+00:00

27

Throughout our time in Brooklyn, Brian’s college roommate, affectionately known in our house as “Stooch,” would periodically urge us to call his ex-wife’s sister, a pediatric transplant doctor down in North Carolina. Though we loved Stooch and knew he meant well, we doubted that the key to Gracie’s well-being lay in contacting Stooch’s ex-wife’s sister. Everyone wants to help. Lots of people point you in different directions.

We didn’t need another doctor in the mix.

But Stooch kept bringing it up, and so finally one Sunday we called, mostly to say we’d done it and be done with it. The doctor we reached, Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, was a total surprise. First of all, she happened to be on vacation when we left a message, but she called us back within an hour. She instantly gave us her pager number and cell. She talked with us for almost an hour. It seemed impossibly generous, someone willing to interrupt their fruity cocktail to chat about HLA tissue matches.

Brian began Googling and ended up in shock: Kurtzberg ran the Cord Blood Bone Marrow Transplant unit at Duke Medical Center in Durham. Using cord blood was relatively new in 2004, and most of the places we’d consulted with had done fewer than twenty CB transplants. Duke had done over two hundred. Cord blood bone marrow transplants were Dr. Kurtzberg’s frontier, and she was Annie Oakley.

Dr. Kurtzberg had no doubt whatsoever that Gracie could be cured using Gabriel’s stem cells, especially given that he was “an extended match.” Of the six key markers that must match, Gabriel and Gracie matched all six, and then matched another twelve markers beyond the six. Given such an ideal scenario, Dr. Kurtzberg urged us to transplant Gracie immediately. The fact that this would require us to move to North Carolina for at least six months, likely longer, and that it meant accepting a serious mortality risk right now, didn’t diminish her confidence. She knew she could cure this child and, she implied, it was our duty to let her do it.

This sent us spinning.

In contrast to other physicians who’d advised us to wait, who’d emphasized the risks in transplanting younger patients, Dr. Kurtzberg had one clear message: do it now.

Her perspective was that every blood transfusion Gracie received was weakening her transplant chances, as it weakened her liver with iron overload. The liver is transplant’s hero, the star, the strongman who does the heavy lifting—filtering and disposing of all the toxins from the chemotherapy drugs necessary to prepare the body. Kurtzberg liked to bet on young, healthy livers, the younger and healthier the better. My intuitive sense of what was best for Gracie flowed in the opposite direction. Gracie’s liver was so little; it was barely three. How could such an inexperienced organ be expected to do such a complex, demanding job?

Talking with Dr. Kurtzberg intensified my confusion to a near frenzy.

“This is nuts,” I said to Brian. “They all say different things. Who are we supposed to trust?” I was manically chopping onions; crying for nonemotional reasons had become a strange pleasure.

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