Zust donates bone marrow to brother
Amanda Zust’s four career saves are nothing compared to the one she recently made off the softball diamond.
In January, brother Robbie Zust was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He needed a bone-marrow transplant.
Amanda was the perfect match.
But the donation came with one condition.
“Before the transplant, it was kind of a joke that we had,” Amanda said. “In order to get my cells, he had to walk with me on Senior Day.”
Just another display of the closeness the siblings share. A bond so strong that Robbie chose to go Iowa partly because of his sister.
It started with Robbie, a 21-year-old sophomore at the University of Iowa, trying to make a donation of his own.
He and a friend attempted to donate plasma in December 2009, but the nurse informed the Des Moines native that his iron count was low and advised him to see a doctor.
Amanda, 21, was driving home from practice with fellow senior softball player and roommate Heidi Daumen when she first heard the news.
“At first, it was shock,” said Amanda, remembering the phone call she got from her mother. “It’s something that you would never expect to go through. You hear other people going through it, but until it hits home, you don’t really realize what it feels like.”
Robbie was admitted the day of his doctor’s appointment, and he has been in the hospital since, spending approximately three months in Des Moines and the last three weeks at the UI Hospitals and Clinics.
Quitting softball never crossed Amanda’s mind, though. Her teammates had grown close to Robbie, and giving up on the sport she loved would be letting her brother down, she said.
“I think it would hurt him more if I chose to quit,” she said. “That was never an option for me. I think that giving up would be giving up on him, too.”
In order to cure leukemia, a patient must undergo a high dose of chemotherapy with or without radiation. But while the treatment eradicates the cancer, it also kills bone marrow. Thus, a donation is necessary for recovery.
The UIHC typically performs 80 to 100 bone-marrow transplants a year and more than 2,500 have occurred since the creation of the Adult Blood and Marrow Transplantation Program in 1980, said Professor Roger Gingrich, the director of the program.
In need of healthy bone marrow, Robbie turned to his sisters, Amanda and Sarah, for help.
While Sarah, 25, wasn’t a match for her brother, Amanda was — a rarity for 70 percent of patients nationwide, according to the National Marrow Donor Program website.
Despite the serious procedure, the pair’s father, Joel Zust, said the sister and brother were in good spirits in the week leading up to the transplant.
“They kid around a lot and poke fun,” he said. “He’s never lost his sense of humor … A week before the operation, he’d tell her to ‘take care of her stem cells. Go home, and go to bed.’ ”
On April 22, Amanda spent roughly five and a half hours donating marrow cells, sitting in a room with IVs in both arms.
For more than 20 years, donating meant using a large needle to draw marrow from the donor’s pelvic bone. Now, doctors inject a “nifty molecule medication” called Filgrastim, Gingrich said.
The medication mobilizes the cells from the bone marrow into the bloodstream, which allows doctors to collect cells with the same machinery used to extract platelets. The cells are then dripped into the patient’s vein and leave the donor virtually painless.
Within minutes, the cells begin to settle, growing and expanding to create new marrow for the recipient, Gingrich said.
And while the process is arduous, it didn’t faze Amanda. The 14-game winner returned to the softball diamond two days later, accompanying the Hawkeyes during their two-game road series at Penn State in State College, Pa.
Iowa head coach Gayle Blevins said she intended to rest her ace pitcher during the first game of the series. But an underwhelming performance from Iowa’s other hurler led to a premature relief appearance against the Nittany Lions.
Amanda tossed 21⁄3 innings on April 24 and 51⁄3 innings on April 25 — a feat Daumen described as a testament to her teammate’s competitive character.
Blevins said she thought it took a lot of courage for the pitcher to stay focused during the season.
“I think of how much you grow when you face difficult adversity,” she said. “It really does shape you as a person. Sometimes you think your experiences are hard until something like that happens in your life. I’m sure it has forced her to find strength in some areas she probably didn’t realize she had.”
According to the National Marrow Donor Program website, a patient’s white blood cell count is low during the first 30 days after a transplant, resulting in a high risk for infection.
But on Thursday, two weeks after the procedure, the Zust family learned that Robbie Zust’s white blood cell and platelet counts are up.
He could be discharged from the UIHC next week — seven days earlier than anticipated.
And Robbie could live up to his promise.
When the Hawkeyes take the field against Michigan on May 14 and 15, the hope is that he will escort his sister to the pitcher’s circle on Senior Day and watch her final two games from the Pearl Field stands.
“It would be a good ending for me as far as my softball career — him being able to experience that with me,” Amanda said. “This whole year has been an emotional roller-coaster ride, to say the least.”
DI reporter Ian Martin contributed to this report.
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