NEW YORK - Lauren Newman will get her long-awaited bone marrow transplant Friday.
A donor was found recently. Lauren has undergone massive radiation and high doses of chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering to prepare her body for the transplant.
Most people in Greenwood know of Lauren's struggle with leukemia, which came back for the third time in February.
Many people in town voluntarily submitted to a test in May to see if they matched. Nobody knows, said Alan Carter, a friend of the Newmans. "They don't tell the donor who it is. They don't tell the recipient."
Back in May, Carter and Janice Ellis Ford decided to help out the 11-year-old child of old Greenwood High School classmate Lacy Newman by starting a move to have people tested. Hundreds of folk showed up all over the state to get a pin prick and get on the bone marrow registry.
"I hope it was one of ours," Carter said of the donor.
The Newmans live in Dallas now, but Lacy Newman grew up in Greenwood down the street from Carter. Newman has two sisters, Becky and Gayle. His mother is Emmy Lou. Lacy's dad was killed in a hunting accident when Lacy was a teenager. Lacy and Carter graduated from GHS in 1968.
The donor, according to Lauren's father, is a partial match. They had to go to New York in late June for Lauren to undergo the radiation, first as an outpatient, and several days later, in the hospital.
Last week, Lauren finished her radiation. Then, she had five days of high dosages of radiation.
"The goal of all these treatments is to eliminate her immune system and marrow, so she can receive the new marrow," her father wrote in a journal on the Web site www.caringbridge.org/visit/laurennewman1.
By Tuesday, her counts were dropping as the physicians intended. But she still has some energy.
"She has played all the nurse aides in gin rummy, and they have taught her 'spit' and 'blackjack,' her father wrote, "Lauren has a good mental attitude going into the transplant, and she is very positive about what she wants to do when she is cured and gets back to Dallas."
