Rose Hennig finally finds a donor and gets her bone marrow transplant

Rose Hennig has finally found her perfect match—though they have never actually met.

She doesn̢۪t know much about the person responsible for saving her life, only that he̢۪s a 24-year-old with two tattoos.

Hennig, a 20-year-old Fresno State student, had thought her battle with a rare and sporadic form of non-Hodgkin̢۪s Burkitt̢۪s Lymphoma was finally over, having completed six months of intensive chemotherapy treatments in late July 2008.

She was eagerly anticipating a return to her life at Fresno State as a Kappa Alpha Theta sister and a member of the equestrian team, but by the end of September, the cancer returned.

And this time, chemotherapy could no longer be trusted to get the job done. Hennig would need a peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) transplant with a match from a bone marrow donor.

Willing donors hard to find

Her sister Kate had a 25 percent chance of being a match, but when those results came back negative, Hennig turned to the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) Registry.

“I had no idea how long it was going to take to find a match,â€Â Hennig said. “It could take months. All I could do was try and stay positive.â€Â

Three potential matches came through in December, but two of the potential donors declined. “I didn’t really think about it until people rejected me,â€Â Hennig said. “I got really angry at first, but then I thought, it’s really their decision. They have a life, too.â€Â

And when the last potential donor, who turned out to be a perfect match, accepted Hennig felt only relief.

“I was kind of shocked by how happy I was,â€Â she said. “I had been trying to push it to the back of my mind, so I wouldn’t have to think about it.â€Â

Bone marrow destroyed before transplant

After another week long chemo treatment at the Stanford Cancer Center, Hennig underwent 11 rounds of radiation to destroy the rest of her remaining bone marrow. “Honestly, I thought it was going to kill me,â€Â she said. “It was probably the most difficult part, the radiation. I fainted the first day, and I’d never fainted before.â€Â

The final few days of chemo were particularly brutal. “I was so much weaker after the radiation,â€Â Hennig said. “It made the chemo that much harder. The effects were pretty dramatic, like it’s very classic to get these really nasty mouth sores that go all the way down your throat, into your stomach. Everybody gets that.â€Â

She spent several weeks in an isolation chamber, in which visitors were required to get “all geared upâ€Â before entering the room, as Hennig’s immune system had been severely compromised in preparation for the transplant.

“The actual transplant goes really fast,â€Â Hennig said, “only about 45 minutes. All of the stem cells are in this one bag.â€Â

After the initial transplant, it takes about 100 days for the stem cells to grow and develop into a new blood system.

And Hennig is looking forward to that day.

“Once the 100 days are up, I can go outside without wearing a mask,â€Â she said. “I can go more places. It’ll still be six months to a year before I can see my horse, though.â€Â

Waiting to live the rest of her life

She also looks forward to the day she can return to Fresno State, to her sorority, and to the equestrian team. “Before any of this happened I was an undeclared major,â€Â Hennig said, “but now I’m thinking about going into nursing, because I figure, who better to help people go through all of this than someone who’s been there already?â€Â

Hennig celebrated her 21st birthday on March 29, surrounded by her family and two other bone marrow transplant (bmt) patients that she met at Stanford.

“I can’t really go buy alcohol yet, though,â€Â she said, “because nobody would really be able to see me underneath my face mask. Maybe next year.â€Â

For more information on becoming a marrow donor, please visit Marrow.org.