From the archives: A 1993 article about Tom Whitehouse

This article originally appeared in The Oregonian on April 25, 1993:

Tom Whitehouse knew almost instantly that the tiny figure coming toward him was Joe O'Neill.

The backlight glaring through the windows Friday afternoon at Detroit Metropolitan Airport hid Joe's face, but not so much that Whitehouse couldn't recognize him from the picture he's been carrying in his wallet for the past few months.

``Joe?'' he said.

The boy's face unzipped into a huge smile. He stuck out a hand haltingly. 

Whitehouse extended his, and the two hands met in an unsure handshake.
That wasn't enough for Whitehouse. He had waited too long for this.

``Aw,'' he said, ``give me a hug.'' And he bent down and wrapped his arms around the boy. Gosh, he's thin.

It was a small beginning, but in the deepest part of their hearts Joe O'Neill and Tom Whitehouse knew what was really important: that there was a beginning at all.
Fifteen months ago, when doctors at Detroit's Harper Hospital injected Whitehouse's bone marrow into Joe, there was no guarantee that he would live to meet the man who gave him his last chance at life.

But the critical one-year point has passed, and Joe's signs are all good. His blood count is normal, the donated marrow is healthy. The light that controls his life is green, and the road is clear.

So their meeting at the airport, and the weekend they spent together, was just a start. The 44-year-old man from Portland and the 12-year-old boy from Novi, Mich., have plans for each other.

Joe wanted to get the relationship started on the right foot. He backed out of the hug and pointed to Whitehouse's chest.

``What's that?'' he said.

Whitehouse looked down, and Joe had him. The boy flipped a quick finger under Whitehouse's nose and giggled. ``Gotcha.''

Whitehouse giggled back at him. Nuts. I should have got him with the joy buzzer.

The first meeting between Tom Whitehouse and Joe O'Neill occurred in a computer chip in Minneapolis sometime around Halloween 1991. The computer was at the headquarters of the National Marrow Donor Program, an organization that matches bone marrow donors with people who need it.

In nine years, the program has generated nearly 1,700 transplants between unrelated people. Forty-five of them have come from Oregon and Southwest Washington through the Red Cross in Portland.

Donors and patients don't have to be related anymore. They have to have identical human leukocyte antigens, a blood factor that triggers immune response in the human body. If the HLA type matches, blood samples from each person are mixed for compatibility. It's called a mixed leukocyte culture.

If that fits, the marrow can be donated to treat a number of blood diseases, including leukemia, Hodgkin's disease and some immune deficiencies. Joe O'Neill was born with aplastic anemia: His system wasn't producing sufficient stem cells in his bone marrow. Because of that, his bone marrow wasn't producing the proper balance of red, white and platelet cells.

The marrow donor program exists for situations like this. Only one patient in four has a relative who matches. The program has 822,000 donors on file; at any given time, 12,000 patients are using its records in search of matches.

It doesn't always work. The program finds matches about 30 percent of the time. The math is staggering: The odds of matching two unrelated people for a transplant range from one in 100 to one in a million. The variable factor is the commonality of a patient's tissue type.

And even if it all fits -- they call it a ``miracle match'' -- the chance of surviving a year after a bone marrow transplant ranges from 35 percent to 65 percent.

The numbers don't tell the whole story. Human nature enters into the equation.
Marrow donors have every chance to back out of the procedure at any time up until the recipient begins the chemotherapy that destroys his or her marrow in preparation for the donation. Some do. They're afraid or uncertain about the affects of the donation.

The program wants to make sure there are no second thoughts. Donors get counseling every step of the way: They are made to understand that the recipients are very sick people; that they might not survive the transplant.

But they are also made to understand that this might be somebody's last chance to live.

Joe's hometown, Novi, is a bedroom community 10 miles west of Detroit. He lives with his mother, older brother and younger sister. It's a normal household, full at any time of the day with neighborhood children and noise.

But Joe has had it rough from the start of his life on Feb. 5, 1981. He was only 5 months old when he was rushed to the hospital with meningitis. It almost killed him.
He took regular immune gamma globulin shots for the first eight years of his life. A series of viruses kept his growth down. Even now, at 12, he weighs between 60 and 65 pounds.

His health was always a problem, but it got serious two years ago.

``Just before he turned 10,'' said his mother, Clarice O'Neill, ``He really got sick with a virus, so I took him in again. The hemotologist thought he had aplastic anemia.''

A second test shortly thereafter confirmed not only the aplastic anemia, but the possibility of serious chromosome changes in his bone marrow.

There was only one way to go -- a transplant. Tests of his family members produced no matches, and there was only one more chance. In the summer of 1991, Clarice O'Neill checked in with the donor program.

Tom Whitehouse was unaware of any of this. He had been a registered donor since 1985, but not until 1989 did he get a call for a match.

That first match lasted until the compatibility test. Whitehouse was disappointed. He got a second call in the summer of 1991. It was another nonmatch,

The rejection also happened during Katie Frohnmayer's well-publicized fight for life against Fanconi's anemia. When the 12-year-old daughter of former Oregon Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer died in September of 1991, Whitehouse was left to wonder.

``For all I know,'' he said, ``one of those two matches could have been her.''

About a month later, he got the call that changed the lives of two people. This time the mixed leukocyte culture was positive. This time, it was really going to happen.

``I talked with Mary Gail Roberts,'' Whitehouse said of his contact at the Red Cross, ``and she gave me the lecture: No jaywalking, wear your seat belt. . . .
``That's when it hit me that somebody is relying on me right now. It's a direct connection.''

``That's also when your emotions are the deepest,'' he said. `It triggers this kind of epiphany. We really all are one big family in this world. We really need each other.''

Clarice O'Neill held off on the procedure until late December. ``I didn't want Joe going through chemotherapy,'' she says, ``during what could be his last Christmas.''

On Dec. 30, Joe began his chemotherapy. On Jan. 9, at Bess Kaiser Hospital in Portland, Tom Whitehouse had 500 milliliters of bone marrow taken from his pelvic bone.

A courier took the marrow, packaged carefully in a small plastic cooler, to Detroit. The marrow was injected into Joe the same day.

Then the waiting began. To guard against the emotional devastation of a failed transplant, the Red Cross allows no identification or personal contact for a year. If the donor and recipient want to establish contact, they do so through mail that is carefully screened by local donor centers.

So Clarice and Pat O'Neill, who are divorced, had no idea just who had given their son another chance at life. They wanted to write a letter the day of the transplant anyhow.

``Dear Donor: We are writing you this short note to express to you our appreciation for your unselfish act of donating your bone marrow to our son Joseph. We are immensely grateful and will be forever in your debt. We hope at the appropriate time to be able to meet you and personally express our gratitude to you.''

Whitehouse wrote back on Jan. 24. ``Dear Family: I don't know where to start. Your letter has finally given a sense of reality to an unknown. There really is someone out there. His name is Joseph. He has blue eyes and the indomitable spirit and hope of youth. He has a loving family who knows the joy of his very existence and the fear for his fragile future.''

The future is here. There are still uncertainties about complications, but there are always uncertainties. The bottom line: Joe O'Neill has come back strong.
``There are,'' his mother said, ``no limits on his future.''

Tom Whitehouse is a hero in the O'Neill house on Village Wood Road in Novi. It said so on a computer-printed banner Saturday afternoon, when Clarice O'Neill invited all of the family and most of the neighborhood to the house to meet Joe's donor.
Whitehouse handled it well, from the hugs to the handshakes to the stream of reporters who showed up when the Detroit media got wind of the story.
He didn't, however, like this hero business.

``There are no real heroics,'' he said. ``One day off and a little pain, but nothing worse than what I got in ice hockey games when I was a kid. I truly believe that Joe's the one who had the courage to make this happen.
``All I did was give him a chance.''

That was enough for Joe. For now.

``I felt like I was lucky,'' he said. ``I get to meet my donor. Not everybody gets to meet their donor.

``He's someone who saved my life. I had a friend named Matt in the hospital. His dad gave four times, and he didn't make it. I'm lucky. I had Tom.''

The weekend was a beginning. Whitehouse talked about how his family just extended a little more. Joe O'Neill is a blood relative now, in one of the most critical senses of the expression.

``I'm taking it slowly,'' Whitehouse said. ``I try to focus on this kid and his sheer joy of life, and how I allowed that to exist.''

Whitehouse was in Michigan for only 39 hours this weekend. In all the whirl of excitement, he didn't get much chance to talk to his new friend. He did, however, get him with the joy buzzer.

Whitehouse already knows that Joe is a practical joker. He knows he likes Detroit's sports teams. He knows he argues with his sister now and then. He knows he loves him.

Joe doesn't know a thing about Tom Whitehouse. In time he will learn that Whitehouse is married, has a 22-year-old daughter and loves college football.

He will find out that Whitehouse is the human resources director at The Oregonian. That he was a decorated Green Beret in Vietnam, that he sings in an oldies rock group on weekends.

There is much they will learn about each other in the future.

And there is no hurry.

--Norm Maves Jr.