Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 8, 1993                   TAG: 9305080369
SECTION: SPECTATOR                    PAGE: 13   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DRAMA TELLS OF MOTHER WHO SAVED A CHILD BY HAVING ANOTHER

Ayala and her husband, Abe, who underwent the reversal of his vasectomy so that he could father the new child, thought they were doing the right thing. As it turned out, they were.

Bone marrow taken from 14-month-old Marissa did save the life of Anissa, 19. Now the Ayalas have two daughters, both healthy, and a son, Airon.

Their story is told in NBC's "For the Love of My Child: The Anissa Ayala Story" (Monday at 9 p.m. on WSLS-Channel 10). Abe Ayala is played by Tony Perez, Mary by Priscilla Lopez (a Tony Award-winner for "Chorus Line") and Anissa by newcomer Teresa DiSpina.

But for a while there in 1990, the Ayalas were on the defensive.

"We never anticipated the reaction," said Mary Ayala. "We never even thought about it. When we decided to do it, we did tell our kids before Abe even had his reversal. We explained to them everything that had to be done, and that then maybe there was a chance. They thought it was a great idea. We didn't think that anyone else would care what we did."

The world found out about the Ayalas' plan through a newspaper reporter who had been following the family's search for a bone-marrow donor for Anissa, whose chronic myelogenous leukemia was diagnosed when she was 16.

Even though Mary Ayala was pregnant, the Ayalas continued the search, because they didn't know whether the baby's marrow would match her sister's. The odds of an unrelated donor's marrow matching Anissa's were 1 in 20,000, but the odds for a sibling are 1 in 4. Airon's did not match Anissa's.

Despite the initial sorrow of Anissa Ayala's story, the movie has a few laughs. One of them involves a bedroom scene between Abe and Mary Ayala in which he protests that he's tired until she appears in a short, black negligee.

"I laughed at that," Ayala said. "I think they portrayed Abe the best - he's very much like that."

There are a couple of fictionalized characters in the film, she said. They are a little boy called Danny and his mother, Rita. Danny, a leukemia patient, gives Anissa his lucky rock when she's ready to undergo intensive radiation and chemotherapy to kill her diseased bone marrow in preparation for the marrow transplant.

Ayala said Anissa, a born-again Christian as are her parents, saw the movie and told her, "What is this? I didn't get my strength from a rock, I got my strength from God."

"They wanted to get the point across that there are people who die all the time without a donor," Ayala said. "It was OK. I didn't object to them putting that in."

On balance, Ayala said, she is satisfied with the film. "We would like to have had more input into it. When we signed our movie rights, people said, `Be careful.' But I think they did a very good job. They tried to do the things that we wanted. People who don't really know us are going to think that everything is true, but people who really do know us will know that everything isn't true."

Anissa, she said, was concerned that the family's religious faith is largely ignored. "That's where I thought if I had had a little more say, we would have definitely included how much our faith has pulled us through this, how much we believe that the Lord gave us this miracle. It was all the prayers from everyone throughout the whole country that helped us."

A year after her bone-marrow transplant, Anissa Ayala, now 21, was married to Bryan Espinosa in Redlands, Calif. Her little sister Marissa, who turned 3 in April, was her flower girl.