Risky Surgery Pays Off For Holt Woman

Cheri Kratzer is working 12-hour days and loving it, after a rare transplant procedure helped her beat the kidney disease and cancer that nearly took her life.

"I decided I wanted to do something that made me feel good at the end of the day, after I went through all this," said Kratzer, the new general manager of Independence Village of Grand Ledge, a senior housing complex.

Kratzer's voice trails off and her eyes tear up every time she talks about the past few years of her life.

The 52-year-old Holt woman went from learning bone marrow cancer and kidney failure could rob her of a future of working hard for many years to come.

Kratzer was believed to be one of only a few in the world to have undergone risky experimental surgery involving a kidney and bone marrow transplant, which works to prevent organ rejection.

Kratzer's brother donated a kidney and bone marrow to her at the same time. It was a year in which Kratzer was near death and then allowed Harvard University doctors to take her closer to the brink in order to take a chance on a miracle.

Harvard Medical School researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston performed the procedures in July 2000. They appear to have cured her cancer, although that won't be certain for at least four more years.

"I feel better than I have in years," Kratzer told the Lansing State Journal for a story.

What's more, she doesn't have to take potent anti-rejection drugs that most transplant patients take for years because her immune system, with the help of her brother's bone marrow, fooled her new kidney into thinking it was her own.

Because of their success in operating on Kratzer and on Janet Madden McCourt of Pembroke, Mass., two years before, Massachusetts General researchers have won a National Institutes of Health grant to expand the study soon to two other hospitals and 10 more patients.

"They were pioneers," Dr. Thomas Spitzer, a Harvard associate professor and director of the bone marrow transplant program, said.

"It went better than we could have dreamed of. It's a very exciting example of how the immune system can be manipulated to both fight cancer and tolerate organ transplant at the same time.

"It's the beginning of our ability to modify the body's stem cells and immune system to control life-threatening diseases."

Bone marrow has its own set of stem cells programmed to become blood cells, he said.

In 1998, Kratzer, then a financial controller for PM One Ltd., the company that owns Independence Village, found out that she was so fatigued because both her kidneys were failed. She had tests to become a transplant candidate.

But in October of that year, she was told she had multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow for which there is no cure. She was taken off the transplant list. After dialysis and chemotherapy, Kratzer was told she had little time left.

Then a relative noticed a small item in the State Journal about the experiment in Boston. Kratzer called the doctors involved in the experiment and flew to Boston in March 2000.

After three of her siblings were tested as donors, her brother, Tom Pantalone, who lives in the Upper Peninsula, turned out to be a perfect match.

Kratzer and her husband, Jim, returned to Boston that July for the surgery. She did not return home until Halloween.

Now, Kratzer is enjoying life by helping others.

In three months she has learned all the names of the village's 120 residents.

"This lady has a calming effect on me," said Mary Atwell, 79. "Just being near her makes me feel good. She always has a smile on her face."

Copyright © 2001 The Detroit News.

This article posted October 23, 2001.