Texas Girl's Family Sacrifices All for Treatment
5-year-old has a rare disorder only treatable outside her home state.
Feb. 8, 2010— -- Emma Routh celebrated her fifth birthday Wednesday in a hospital bed full of equipment and princess crowns. How many more birthdays she has may depend in large part on the sacrifices her struggling family makes to obtain her health care.
Emma has Fanconi anemia, which strikes only one in three million people. Emma's parents have already sacrificed a lifetime of possessions to get her treatment at Children's Hospital Boston.
"We've lost our house, we've lost almost everything back home just to make sure we can do this transplant and we get to keep her," said Emma's mother, Brandy Routh, 27.
The Rouths live in a rural area outside the town Palestine, Texas, and the family was on Medicaid when Emma was diagnosed with Fanconi anemia in June 2008.
By December they lost their house and car as the medical bills grew. Emma's two brothers, David, 8, and Dalton, 2, moved in with Routh's father while she spent almost every extra hour ensuring the trip to Boston could happen.
"When Emma got diagnosed I was a full-time student, I gave up my education. I dropped out of college just to make sure there was something I could have done," said Routh.
Routh's first task was to find a bone marrow donor, so she attended 56 bone marrow drives and signed up 25,000 people to a bone marrow registry while searching for someone who matched her daughter. It took more than a year, but in October 2009, the family had found a match.
Despite the name, the Fanconi anemia is much more complicated than anemia. Specialists say it affects every single cell in a person's body, striking the bone marrow in early childhood and threatening young patients' lives. Anemia was only a symptom.
The condition also complicates the treatment process. The traditional "conditioning" process of chemotherapy and radiation designed to prepare cancer patients for a bone marrow transplant often kills Fanconi anemia patients, according to Dr. Leslie Lehmann, clinical director of the pediatric bone marrow transplant program at Dana Farber Cancer Institute/Children's Hospital Boston.
"You'd need to go to a medical center that specializes in this kind of bone marrow failure, and there's a handful in America," said Lehmann.
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