Rose-Leigh Usher - the Durban cancer patient who recently underwent a stem cell transplant - could be home this week.
|||Cape Town - Rose-Leigh Usher - the Durban cancer patient who underwent a life-changing stem-cell transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital - could be out of isolation and home within a week following her recovery.
Professor Nicolas Novitzky, head of UCT’s haematology unit and who is treating the nine-year-old girl, said she was “progressing well”.
“She is doing very well… she will probably be discharged within a week or so and hopefully she will be ready to go home. Everything is going perfectly fine at the moment,” he said.
Her possible discharge follows six weeks of strict isolation after the critical transplant was performed last month.
Rose-Leigh was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer - hepatosplenic gamma-delta T-cell lymphoma - last June.
Because she had no matching donor in South Africa, the stem-cell unit was imported from the US Cord Stem Cell Bank.
In preparation for her transplant, Rose-Leigh had to undergo a week of intensive chemotherapy to kill her immune system and malignancy on her bone marrow to ensure the engraftment of the new cells.
Novitzky said Rose-Leigh would still need to be strictly monitored for another four weeks to ensure that her weak immune system did not succumb to infections.
So far, Novitzky said, there were no signs of her body rejecting the new cells - a condition that was common to transplant patients.
Rose-Leigh’s mother, Rosemary Ullbricht, said the family was optimistic about her recovery.
“Even though I’m no longer in Cape Town, I’ve received very positive reports about her progress. Her blood results are apparently very good… they show a lot of cell multiplication of cells. I heard that she is now eating on her own again and has regained her sense of taste, which she lost at some point following the transplant. I’m so excited and I can’t wait for her to be back home,” she said.
Rose-Leigh’s story has touched so many people’s lives that, in February, readers of the Cape Argus’s sister newspaper in Durban - the Daily News - opened their hearts and wallets and raised more than R600 000 needed to secure the stem cells and also pay for hospital costs.
sipokazi.fokazi@inl.co.za
Cape Argus