BONE MARROW: TRANSPLANTS DIFFER FOR AREA RESIDENTS

When Ronald "Ike" Carlton donated his bone marrow to his twin brother Mike nearly six months ago, he was ready to go play golf the following weekend.

He didn't. "It rained," said Carlton, a Cape Girardeau bank collection officer.

Lyndea "Lindy" Dew's experience was a bit different. Five weeks ago, the 22-year-old Northwestern University student donated bone marrow to an unidentified woman dying of leukemia on the East Coast.

"I couldn't walk for three or four days," she said.

The operation requires inserting two ballpoint pen-sized needles into the pelvic bone of the donor. Normally, two quarts of marrow and developing blood are extracted in an hour-and-a-half procedure performed under general anesthesia.

In Dew's case, however, more marrow had to be taken because one of the counts in her blood was very low. The operation doubled to three hours long.

Dew says her small size, 5-5 and 115 pounds, probably contributed to her slow recovery. But she said the extended length of the operation was the real problem.

"I had an anesthesia headache," she said.

"But I wouldn't want anyone to think it wasn't worth doing."

Dew, who graduated from Cape Central High School in 1989, is the daughter of Cape Girardeau educators Judy and Larry Dew. She is a senior majoring in political science and Asian history at Northwestern in Evanston, Ill.

Though she still gets tired in the afternoons, she has gradually resumed her bustling schedule, which includes a full load of classes, an internship at a downtown Chicago bank and job interviews, most recently in Cincinnati and New York.

"I feel great right now," Dew says.

For Ike Carlton, that feeling returned almost immediately after the operation. "I felt some discomfort in my back," he said, "but none that would deter me from doing anything I ordinarily do."

He asked the physician at St. Louis University Medical Center, where the operation was performed, if he could play golf the follow Saturday.

"He said, `Yes, but you won't play too good,'" Carlton recalls.

Aside from the scars made by the needles, Carlton had no after effects from the operation. "I was as good the next day as I am right now," he says.

"...Most people don't come through it that way," he acknowledged.

He talked to Lindy Dew before her transplant operation, and told her how quickly he bounced right back.

"She probably thought I was a big liar," he said.

Dew simply says, "I wish I were that lucky."

Thus far, the recipients of the bone marrow transplants also have had different reactions. Mike Carlton is completely free of cancer and his white cell counts are healthy once again.

"All my counts are in the normal range," he said. "That's the main dipstick for a bone marrow transplant."

Carlton, 47, has returned to light duty with the Cape Girardeau Fire Department.

"I'm back to work but not back on the crew yet," he said.

He is not returned to robust health yet, but says, "My doctor has 100 percent confidence I will be 100 percent normal."

The first 100 days after the recipient receives the bone marrow are the most critical because of the possibility of infection. Carlton has passed that milestone and is in the second phase of the healing process.

He works out on a treadmill in his house and lifts weights. "Strength is one of those things that comes back slowly," he said. "I'm supposed to get plenty of exercise."

His doctors have not released him to go back to full-time work. "You don't recover overnight," he said.

Now he is being checked every three months. "It'll probably be a year before I don't even think about this thing anymore," Carlton said..

Unlike Carlton, the 36-year-old recipient of Lindy Dew's bone marrow has not responded to her transplant. Dew inquires weekly into the woman's progress, though she will not be allowed to contact her directly for a year.

"As of now there's no sign," she said. "It's a little bit disheartening."

But marrow transplants can take up to six months to have an effect on the recipient, whose own marrow cells are destroyed by chemotherapy and radiation prior to the transplant.

The woman already has been put back on the National Marrow Donor Registry, which originally paired her with Dew.

Dew had signed up with the registry in 1991 in an attempt to help a fellow college student who had leukemia. They were not a match and the young man eventually died.

Dew remained on the registry, and out of the blue late last fall was notified that she had been matched.

Since the transplant, she has been receiving a letter a week from fellow students and people in her home town who support her willingness to help this unknown woman.

"They make my day," she said.

The experience has changed her, Dew said. "You make your priorities a little bit different. Before I was obsessed with looking for a job."

Now, she admits, she's just concerned instead of obsessed.