Sister saves brother’s life while fighting through own illness
Published: November 13, 2005
After May 1, 2000, life was never the same for siblings Shauna Sprong and Richard Truman.
Truman, 58, had been sick for five weeks, the same five weeks he’d been home following his mother’s death from pancreatic cancer, a diagnosis she’d received just three weeks prior to passing.
At the time, he thought it was just his diabetes acting up.
After returning to his Denver home, he received more bad news to share with his already grieving family.
“Thirty-one days (after my mom’s death), I get a phone call from Richie. (He) said, ‘I got leukemia,’” Sprong, 45, said.
“Richie,” as he is affectionately known by his family, was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia. Commonly called APL, the disease is a malignancy of the bone marrow in which there is a deficiency of mature blood cells.
The bad news didn’t end there for the family.
“I was upset. At 4 a.m. we got a call. My niece was killed in a car wreck. (This) all in one month,” Sprong said, fighting tears.
As the family continued to try to move on, their main priority was getting Truman, who was given a two-year life expectancy, a chance to live longer.
Finding a match
Of the seven children in their family, Sprong is the youngest of the brood. Truman is the oldest.
Immediately, the siblings underwent bone marrow testing, because doctors said the only way Truman was going to survive was to have a bone marrow transplant.
Dr. Rathi Mahendran, an oncologist at Marion General Hospital’s Cancer Care Center, said that while having cancer is not an easy thing to deal with, APL is an easier one to have.
“Worst come to worst, that’s pretty good,” Mahendran said. “It’s very, very treatable. We now have treatments that can cure the disease of APL.”
APL is more typical in young children, she said.
“About after 40, the incidents get higher, (but) the older you get, the mutation rates are higher,” she said.
Truman had tried many treatments, including chemotherapy, and took several drugs as part of drug testing trials, like arsenic trioxide, which slows the growth of cancer cells and their spread in the body. But nothing was working, and a marrow transplant was the only option left.
“I was going down the tube,” Truman said. “We went to the World Wide Web, and there was no donors.”
Another sister in the family is a 13-year brain cancer survivor and could not donate marrow, so that took Truman’s potential family matches down to five. Sprong was the last of the siblings to get tested. She admitted that, after all their other siblings did not prove to be a match, she didn’t think she would have any luck, either.
But then received a phone call from Denver. This time, her brother said, there was hope. Truman’s wife called Sprong, and before she could get any words out, his wife thanked her for being a match.
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