Rolling Meadows teen's families celebrate 10 years after marrow transplant

Kyle Reid remembers a doctor telling him that the most important milestone - the one that would allow his Rolling Meadows family to finally exhale - was the 10-year anniversary of his daughter Teagen's bone marrow transplant.

Hit that, the doctor said, and they could be confident that Teagen wouldn't face a third bout with leukemia.

That long-awaited day came and went Jan. 18, but not without a couple hundred people close to Teagen, including her bone marrow donor, crowding Durty Nellie's in Palatine to celebrate the Fremd High School senior's life.

"It's a little surprising that it takes that long to get out of the woods," Kyle Reid said. "I felt a little better after that first year, but this was the big milestone."

There was a time when the Reids wondered if Teagen would ever see that day.

Kyle and wife Maura, both Palatine Township Elementary District 15 teachers, thought their oldest child was healthy two years after a seemingly successful treatment for acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), a cancer of the blood and bone marrow.

But as Teagen started second grade in 2001, she got sick and couldn't kick it. Then Maura Reid noticed her left eye was bulging.

"I said, 'Teegs, cover your right eye and tell me how many fingers I'm holding up,'" Maura Reid recalled. "And she said, 'OK, well put them up.'"

Cancer cells had attacked Teagen's optic nerve, resulting in permanent blindness in that eye. But more concerning was that only about one-fifth of children with leukemia ever relapse. Teagen's doctors had never encountered a repeat case, and put her odds of survival at 30 percent.

She needed a bone-marrow transplant, but neither her parents nor younger sister Baylen were a match. So the Reids headed up to Milwaukee, where the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin was known for doing transplants from unrelated donors.

About five years earlier and 1,200 miles to the south, Rita Zapien was a Texas A&M University freshman helping out at a conference for the Awareness of Mexican-American Culture. A hospital was there as well, urging Hispanics to join the national bone marrow registry.

According to the National Marrow Donor Program, which has 9 million potential donors and in 2010 facilitated more than 5,200 transplants, the odds of minorities finding a match are worse than a white patient's.

Zapien gave her blood - today only a cheek swab is needed - and didn't think much about it until the call came that she had matched a little girl with leukemia.

"I was in shock," she said. "I knew I would do it, but you never really think you'll get the call."

For Zapien, now a 34-year-old dietitian living in Houston, there was more blood work, testing, counseling and then the bone marrow harvest, a relatively simple procedure that left her sore. The most stressful part, she said, was keeping herself alive and healthy until the harvest.

"I kept thinking about getting hit by eighteen-wheelers or spinning out my car," Zapien said. "I was obsessed with my own safety because someone else's life depended on mine."

For the Reids, the transplant process wasn't so easy. Intensive chemotherapy left Teagen very sick and with zero immunity. Her parents alternated nights by her isolation room bedside and the Ronald McDonald House in Milwaukee. For a month, Baylen Reid could only look at her older sister through a glass window and slip notes under the door. And Maura Reid went into labor with daughter Breslen, now 9, while in Teagen's hospital room.

"It's probably best that Teagen doesn't remember much," Maura Reid said. "The stress and pain she was going through is still clear in our minds."

Though recovery was slow, life slowly got back to normal until the Reid family expanded yet again.

This time, however, it was Rita and her family joining as honorary members. They had an emotional meeting in Texas a year after the transplant, and there have since been several visits north and south.

One chance encounter has everyone convinced their connection was meant to be. A year after the first meeting, the Reids were in the amusement park area of Mall of America in Minnesota when they heard a familiar voice.

"All of a sudden there was a 'y'all,'" Maura Reid said. "I knew immediately I was going to turn around and see Rita standing there."

Zapien and her mother, Herlinda, just happened to be visiting family when they ran into the Reids.

"It was one of those signs from above that they were meant to be in our lives forever," Maura Reid said.

Zapien hopes stories like theirs will compel people to join the bone marrow registry, especially those whose cultures believe the process is harmful. Every year, more than new 10,000 patients in the U.S. need a marrow or cord blood transplant from an unrelated donor, according to the National Marrow Donor Program.

Meanwhile, with the exception of her vision and below-average lung capacity, Teagen is thriving, focused on which college to pick and honing her baking and cooking skills.

She was accepted into Northwestern University's Medical Explorers program, and wants to major in math before going to medical school to become a pediatrician.

"A lot of my friends who had cancer hate the hospital, but I love it," Teagen said. "I'm not sure I could do oncology, but I love that someone can be sick and most of the time you can help them."