DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Yale hockey player Mandi Schwartz was diagnosed with leukemia 25 months ago, at the end of the first semester of her junior year. She has spent most of her life since then waging a brave fight against the disease, and becoming the centerpiece of an outpouring that has stretched from New Haven to her home in Wilcox, Saskatchewan and resulted in nearly 5,000 people joining bone-marrow registries in the U.S. and Canada.
Everybody hoped for a happy ending to the hideous ordeal, but that seems less likely by the day, Schwartz' leukemia returning late last month and continuing to rampage through her body even as she underwent yet another round of chemotherapy. Her most recent bone marrow test shows there are 54% leukemia blasts in her bone marrow.
The family has stopped the chemo now. Schwartz is at home in Saskatchewan.
Scarcely four months after she underwent a stem-cell transplant at a Seattle hospital that seemed to promise fresh hope, Mandi Schwartz, who has had three relapses in less than a year, seems to be out of options, and almost out of time.
She is 22 years old.
"We ask for your support in prayers as we treasure our time with her at home," Carol Schwartz, Mandi's mother, wrote in an online posting to her daughter's supporters.
Schwartz, whose battle with the disease has been the covered by numerous media outlets, including the Daily News, was first declared to be in remission in the spring of 2009, following months of aggressive chemotherapy treatment. She returned to Yale in January 2010, and her goal was to return to the team for the this season, but the cancer returned in April, at which point the stem-cell transplant was deemed the only viable option.
While Mandi continued to try to fend off one of the most virulent forms of cancer around, the Yale community rallied around her, organizing bone-marrow registry drives and raising funds for the family - including the $15,000 the women's hockey team generated in an event in November that drew a record crowd to Yale's Ingalls Rink. The women's golf team has announced plans to play "100 Holes For Mandi." Nobody has been more steadfast in support of Mandi and her family then her hockey teammates. Before her transplant last fall, Mandi wrote to her teammates.
She said, "I'm praying every day for everything to work out, and I know you all are thinking about me and praying for me - thank you very much - your support means the world to me. I think about the team, your workouts, the busy school day, and the beautiful feeling of stepping out onto that ice every day."
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