Mandi Schwartz Update!

(C) New York Times

By THOMAS KAPLAN
Published: September 22, 2010

Mandi Schwartz, the Yale hockey player whose battle with leukemia has drawn widespread attention, underwent a stem-cell transplant on Wednesday that her doctors hope will save her life.
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Schwartz, 22, was infused with umbilical cord blood from two donors. No problems were reported during the procedure at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance’s adult inpatient transplant unit at the University of Washington Medical Center, an Alliance spokesman said.

Schwartz, of Wilcox, Saskatchewan, has had acute myeloid leukemia for nearly two years. Her cancer has returned twice after going into remission — most recently last month, when her transplant had been scheduled. Instead, she had to have another course of chemotherapy.

Schwartz is likely to remain hospitalized for about a month. In about three and a half weeks, her white blood cell count should return to a safe level, said Dr. Colleen Delaney, the director of the Cord Blood Transplant Program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, which is one of the three organizations that formed the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

There is a relatively low risk that Schwartz’s body will reject the transplant, Delaney said in a telephone interview. The more significant threat — particularly in the next few months — is that her cancer might return.

“She’s got a pretty aggressive disease, and our hope is that we are putting her in a pretty good place not to relapse,” Delaney said. “That’s her biggest battle.”

Schwartz’s case has been widely documented, thanks to aggressive efforts to find a stem-cell donor by her family, friends and teammates as well as Tedd Collins IV, who founded two leukemia-related charities after his daughter, a Yale medical student, died a year ago after having the disease.

Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, started an investigation into Collins’s charities after The New York Times reported in July that Collins had a tangled legal history and is the subject of a federal fraud investigation.

Blumenthal’s investigation remains active, a spokesman for his office said Wednesday. Yale ceased working with Collins two months ago, when Blumenthal started his inquiry, and a spokeswoman for the university said Wednesday that Yale had not had any contact with Collins since.