Yale Women's Ice Hockey Player Gets Umbilical Cord Stem-Cell Transplant
Mandi Schwartz
Sam Rubin/Yale University via Bloomberg
Mandi Schwartz, a Yale University women's ice hockey player, poses at Yale's Ingall's Rink in New Haven, Connecticut.
Mandi Schwartz, a Yale University women's ice hockey player, poses at Yale's Ingall's Rink in New Haven, Connecticut. Photographer: Sam Rubin/Yale University via Bloomberg
Mandi Schwartz
David Silverman/DSPics.com via Bloomberg
Mandi Schwartz, a Yale University women's ice hockey player in action.
Mandi Schwartz, a Yale University women's ice hockey player in action. Photographer: David Silverman/DSPics.com via Bloomberg
Yale University women’s ice hockey player Mandi Schwartz was undergoing a stem-cell transplant today in hopes of re-growing the infection-fighting white blood cells she needs to survive.
Doctors, who eradicated her cancer cells with multiple chemotherapy and radiation treatments Sept. 15 through 20 at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, now will use stem cells from two, anonymous umbilical-cord blood donors to re-grow healthy, cancer-free cells.
“She can be one very aggressive girl,” Mandi’s mother, Carol, wrote on her website. “She will win!”
Yale’s athletic department held drives each of the past two springs, registering more than 1,600 people with the National Marrow Donor Program’s “Be The Match” registry. Drives held in Canada added another 2,600 to the Canadian version of the registry.
Schwartz, 22, an economics major from Wilcox, Saskatchewan, was initially diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia -- a cancer that starts inside the bone marrow and grows from cells that were supposed to become white blood cells -- in December of 2008.
When doctors couldn’t find a bone marrow donor, they turned to umbilical cord blood.
Mandi’s parents, Carol and Rick, and Mandi’s fiance, Kaylem Prefontaine, traveled to Seattle for the operation. Her younger brothers, Jaden, and Rylan, both ice hockey players at Colorado College, visited. Jaden was selected in the first round (No. 14 overall) of the National Hockey League draft by the St. Louis Blues in June.
To contact the reporter on this story: Curtis Eichelberger in Washington at ceichelberge@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Sillup at msillup@bloomberg.net
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