'You Saved My Life'

By Bob Groves

Staff Writer

The gift was a little boy's life -- and until recently, the giver was anonymous.

On Friday, Jordan Kerin, a 6-year-old leukemia patient from Cresskill, finally met Rosemarie DiMarco, his bone marrow donor, who hugged him for the first time like a fairy godmother and guardian angel rolled into one.

"Thank you for saving my life," Jordan told DiMarco in a small voice after a brief ceremony at Hackensack University Medical Center, where he had received the transplant in November 1998.

"You don't have to thank me. It was a privilege and an honor," said DiMarco, 29, of Philadelphia, who works for the New Jersey Department of Human Services.

"I'm so happy to do it. This is one of the happiest days of my whole life -- that you feel fantastic," she said, kneeling beside the boy.

"I have a present for you," said DiMarco, who gave Jordan a necklace with a gold chai, the Jewish symbol for life. "I wanted to give you something so you could always remember me." DiMarco is Roman Catholic; the Kerins are Jewish.

"We have your blood, which is fabulous," Jordan's mother, Lauren, told DiMarco as the boy's father, Brad, and sister, Jessica, 9, stood beaming nearby.

"You have an extraordinary daughter," Lauren Kerin told DiMarco's parents, Joseph and Fran DiMarco of Staten Island.

"You have an extraordinary son," said Fran DiMarco, lowering a small camera to brush away a tear.

Two dozen doctors, nurses, and other health care workers at the Don Imus WFAN Pediatric Center for Tomorrows Children swallowed hard and dabbed their eyes as the Kerin and DiMarco families embraced during the event they arranged to meet each other and thank the hospital for its help. DiMarco had spoken once before to the Kerins, by phone.

In August 1998, on his fifth birthday, Jordan was diagnosed with acute myelocytic leukemia, or AML, an often-fatal form of blood cancer that strikes 500 children annually in the United States.

AML causes white blood cells to multiply out of control and overpower the bone marrow, hindering the bone marrow's ability to produce new, much-needed oxygen-bearing red cells, disease-fighting white cells, and platelets that help clotting.

When three courses of chemotherapy failed to slow the disease -- and Jordan's sister did not prove a bone marrow match -- doctors turned to the National Bone Marrow Donor Registry, which has 3 million potential donors listed according to bone marrow types.

Bone marrow between donor and recipient is matched according to eight of 50 different proteins. Among siblings, there is a 25 percent probability of finding a marrow match.

Among unrelated donors and recipients, the odds "could be one in 20,000, or one in a million," said Alicia Sartori, director of the marrow program at the New York Blood Center, which arranged DiMarco's donation at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Finding a match "can be rare, because you just never know if you'll find the [marrow] typing. It's like matching DNA," Sartori said.

Luckily, one of those 3 million potential donors was DiMarco, who has been registered since 1991. Jordan was the second recipient of her bone marrow. Three years ago, she helped saved the life of an 18-year-old Rhode Island man suffering from a fatal nervous-system disease.

DiMarco was not paid for her donations. She said this was something she wanted to do to help others, after hearing on television about the need for bone marrow.

"People have said to me, 'What a wonderful thing this is. You're a hero, a saint, an angel!' I see it as a tremendous privilege and a blessing, knowing that you could give life to somebody. It was a remarkable feeling," she said.

Jordan's cancer is in full remission and his prognosis "appears to be excellent," said Dr. Joel Brochstein, director of the pediatric stem-cell transplant program at Hackensack University Medical Center.

"He shows no signs of recurrence of leukemia, and his side effects remain under good control. But we'll have to follow him closely for another two years to make sure the leukemia doesn't come back," Brochstein said.

The side effects included graft-vs.-host disease, a reverse of organ-transplant rejection in which the donor's marrow "recognizes" the recipient's body as "foreign" and attacks the immune system.

Hackensack University Medical Center began its marrow transplant program for families in 1990, but didn't include unrelated donors until 1996, Brochstein said.

Bone marrow transplant donors and recipients usually find the experience too emotional for a face-to-face meeting. In more than 100 unrelated-donor transplants at the hospital, DiMarco and Jordan are the first donor and recipient to meet.

"I hope we continue to see each other. I want to watch you grow up, and to hang out with you," DiMarco told Jordan. "All I knew about you was that you were a little boy who was 5 years old and was sick.

"I started calling you 'My Little Guy.' You're a strong little guy and you fight pretty hard. I prayed for you all the time.

"The only thing I need is that you continue to feel good," she said.

Copyright © 2000 Bergen Record Corp.