Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 5, 1994 TAG: 9405050151
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
At the same time, plans were under way to create the first bone marrow donor center for the Roanoke Valley.
Last month, the two came together, and a match was made.
Meadows, out of work for more than a year, landed a job as the center's full-time coordinator - removing the last obstacle in a three-year effort to get the program off the ground.
Already, the center has $15,000 in the bank and another $5,000 coming, but no donors.
It will be up to Meadows to recruit them.
Dr. Yen Hsueh, who hired Meadows, has great confidence in her ability to do so.
"She stood out" from the list of 120 applicants because of her experience, he said. "She's just so excellent."
Hsueh is principal officer of the Appalachian Regional Blood Services of the American Red Cross, which oversees the bone marrow center. The center will match healthy donors with people who need bone marrow transplants - cancer patients whose own bone marrow has been damaged by chemotherapy or other treatments.
The center will be self-sufficient, raising its own money and operating with a staff of one: Meadows.
Although her new job differs greatly from the one she left at Northwestern Memorial Hospital's transplant center, Meadows is happy to be back in the field. At Northwestern, she worked with marrow recipients, testing the donated marrow to make sure it was still healthy enough to transplant.
Roanoke's center - which will serve Southwestern Virginia and West Virginia - won't do any transplants. Here, Meadows will work with the donors, not the recipients.
She'll run community education programs. She'll organize donor drives. If a match is made, she'll contact the donor and accompany the donor to a bone marrow collection center.
"If somebody is going to be a donor, then I will work with them every step of the way," she said.
She'll even take the healthy bone marrow to the person who needs it - anywhere in the world, she said.
The recipient must receive the bone marrow within 36 hours, Meadows said.
The Marrow Donor Center of the Virginias will hold its first donor drive Friday at Radford University, for students only. A Roanoke drive - open to the public - is scheduled for June 4. A third drive is planned for Martinsville, but no date has been set.
Hsueh said the center must raise about $30,000 each year from the community, some of which it hopes to bring in with fund drives. The rest of its $110,000 annual budget will come from the National Marrow Donor Program and other grants.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***