by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

May 01, 2008

Little did Lea Wolff Rosenberg realize in 1995 that an article she read in MetroWest Jewish News (now NJ Jewish News) would enable her to save a man’s life 10 years later.

The story concerned West Orange resident Jay Feinberg, who was desperately seeking a bone marrow transplant to treat his life-threatening leukemia.

She and others in her family volunteered to be tested for compatibility. Although none was a match for Feinberg, the HLA Registry in River Edge had kept their names and medical information on file.

Another donor was able to provide the bone marrow that saved Feinberg’s life (see sidebar).

Then one day three years ago, the phone rang at Rosenberg’s West Caldwell home. The call came from the registry.

“They said I might be a match for somebody and [asked] might I still be interested in donating,” she recalled recently. “I said, ‘of course.’”

They asked Rosenberg to donate not bone marrow but stem cells. It meant she had to undergo a long battery of tests, including a psychiatric examination.

“They wanted to make sure I wouldn’t back out at the last minute and leave someone without any immunity at all,” she explained.

Once she passed, Rosenberg needed five injections in her stomach to beef up her stem cell count. She said doctors used a long needle that “looked more ugly than it was painful.”

“Then they strapped me down in what looks like a straitjacket,” she said. “You have two sessions for three to three-and-a-half hours each. You can’t move. If you move, it upsets the whole process. They even assign a nurse to be with you in case you have to scratch your nose. You can’t do that. But it is not painful. It is like giving blood.”

Throughout the process, she had no idea who the recipient was.

“All I knew was that he was a 47-year-old-man who had leukemia and no hope unless he found a match. Then I got a call from the registry. They said he was alive and would like to be in touch with me, and asked would I like to be in touch with him?”

Rosenberg readily agreed. The registry helped put them together on transatlantic phone calls between England and New Jersey.

A special feeling

The recipient was George Kannides, a Greek Cypriot living in London. After he was first diagnosed with leukemia in 2003, doctors gave him two or three months to live.

After receiving Rosenberg’s stem cells a year later, he remains cancer-free.

Although the two have been in touch by telephone and e-mail, they had never met until two weeks ago.

Finally, on April 16, Rosenberg and her husband, Jerry, met Kannides and his wife, Koula, at London’s Heathrow Airport. It was the start of a six-day visit to Kannides’ home.

“There are no words to describe how I felt when I saw them waiting for us at the airport,” she wrote in an e-mail to NJJN. “Only happiness, my heart jumping out of my chest. We hugged and sobbed tears of joy. I had been waiting three-and-a-half years, but still I was not prepared for the emotions I felt at this wonderful moment.”

Kannides shared her excitement.

“My feelings were indescribable and more or less the same way as Lea felt,” he wrote Kannides in the e-mail. “It was a special feeling that cannot be described. I owe my life to Lea. She was like finding the missing piece of my life. Now I feel complete.”

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A database of hope

After a bone marrow transplant helped him beat leukemia, former West Orange resident Jay Feinberg left his job in finance to devote his life to matching bone marrow and stem cell donors with ailing recipients.

Seventeen years later, his Florida-based Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation, one of the three such registries in the United States, has facilitated some 1,500 transplants.

The registries are linked up into one global database that provides potential lifelines for people with forms of leukemia, lymphoma, immuno-deficiencies, and aplastic anemia.

Feinberg said the database is a vast improvement over his methods in 1995, when he would put notices in NJJN to hunt for potential donors.

“The drives we ran in New Jersey were really grassroots. The registry was very small,” he told NJJN. “But we were not going to sit back and do nothing and my family was determined to find a match.”

In 2007, Gift of Life helped save 90 people. In the first three months of 2008, Feinberg said that 30 patients have received bone marrow or stem cells through his organization.

The donors he seeks are of Eastern European-Jewish ethnicity.

“Tissue type is inherited, so your best chance of finding a genetic match is with someone with a similar ethnic background,” Feinberg explained. “We work with African-American and Hispanic groups to help them recruit donations from their populations. If you are part of a minority, you do not have as good a representation in the registry as the typical Caucasian in finding a match.

“We are trying to increase the diversity of the registry. It is a remarkable gift,” he said.

— ROBERT WIENER

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