Positivity: Cancer in Remission Thanks to Experimental Treatment — and a Loving, “Nagging” Spouse

This is most of a long-but-worth-it article about a man whose cancer has been put into remission by an experimental treatment using stem cells from his own blood, and the spouse who has been by his side the whole way:

A Team Effort
By GLENDA SANDERS, DAILY SUN
March 19

SUMMERFIELD — Sam Matrisciano is quick to give credit where credit is due.

Although he’d been diligent about routine annual physical exams in North Carolina, he had not found a physician since moving to Del Webb Spruce Creek in 2000.

Even as the characteristic fatigue he’d been experiencing for some time gradually escalated, he procrastinated, despite nudging from his wife, Marge.

“He kept saying he was tired, he was tired,” Marge recalled.

The day his legs were aching and cramping so badly that he couldn’t finish a round of golf, Marge reached the end of her patience.

“I told him, ‘That’s it. I’m not going to listen anymore,’” Marge said.

Sam capitulated, allowing Marge to drag him, “kicking and screaming,” he said, to an urgent-care clinic in Belleview.

After routine blood tests, a nurse practitioner diagnosed him with anemia and referred him to a physician. That physician read his test results and referred him to a hematologist, or blood specialist.

Matrisciano knew, when that referral came, that the symptoms he’d been trying to ignore probably signaled the diagnosis he’d been fearing: cancer.

“A hematologist is blood — why are you thinking the worst?” Marge asked, holding on to optimism.

“We got to the door and the sign said hematology/oncology,” Matrisciano said. “Deep down, I knew it. You just feel . . . so . . . bad.”

The oncologist was able to put a name on the cancer that had invaded the fit, healthy body that Matrisciano, 68, a retired law officer, had always taken for granted: multiple myeloma.

Multiple myeloma, the second-most common blood cancer after non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, is considered a cancer of the blood, but it invades the bones.

“That’s pretty much where it goes when it starts to spread,” Matrisciano said.

The diagnosis explained Matrisciano’s fatigue and, later, the pain in his legs, far too well to invite doubt.

Matrisciano began a regimen of oral chemotherapy and thalidomide — the drug that was responsible for an epidemic of birth defects in 12,000 infants when it was prescribed as a sleeping aid and morning sickness preventive between late 1957 and 1960. A third of the babies born with thalidomide-induced deformities died before their first birthdays.

A side effect of the chemo and thalidomide was neuropathy, a loss of sensation or nerve death in the outer extremities, often caused by diabetes.

When Matrisciano began losing his balance, he was given a new chemo treatment and referred to the Moffat Cancer Center in Tampa.

There he was given a chart of how his treatment would progress, beginning with papers and consent forms, progressing to tests, and then to treatment.

Marge, Sam Matrisciano said, was with him through every step of the process, including the bone marrow test, during which doctors took samples of bone and marrow from his hip with a device resembling a corkscrew.

For the test, he was lying on his stomach while doctors worked on his hip bone.

“There was no pain until they got to the bone,” he said. “Then all I could do (in response to the pain) was curl my toes up and point my feet.”

Doctors immediately considered a state-of-the-research treatment, a stem cell transplant, for Matrisciano, but his age gave them pause.

“Everything in the brochure points at people under 65,” Matrisciano said. “I was 68.”

Matrisciano didn’t feel his age should exclude him.

“I told the doctors, ‘Except for the cancer, I’m pretty healthy.’”

After considering the type of cancer Matrisciano was battling and his overall condition, doctors agreed that he was a candidate for an autologous stem cell transplant, in which stem cells would be removed from Matrisciano’s blood, frozen, then injected back into him after a strict preparation regimen to receive them.

“You’re a prime candidate for this procedure,” Matrisciano remembers the doctor saying. “If you weren’t healthy, I wouldn’t do it.”

In early September 2005, Matrisciano, in preparation for the harvesting of the stem cells he would later have transplanted back into his body, underwent chemotherapy to kill cancer cells in his blood. He also was given a growth-factor drug that forces stem cells from the bone marrow into the bloodstream.

His blood was extracted in two 2.5-hour sessions and filtered through a machine that separated the stem cells from the other factors in the blood like red and white blood cells and platelets. With the stem cells removed, Matrisciano’s blood was returned to his body.

The filtering process, apheresis, is similar to kidney dialysis, in which blood is cleansed of impurities normally filtered from the blood by healthy kidneys.

….. After 17 days at Moffat for the preparation and harvesting of his stem cells, Sam and Margie Matrisciano returned home.

Because his immune system was compromised by the chemotherapy, he was instructed to “stay close to home” and avoid situations where he might be exposed to diseases.

In early October, he returned to Moffat to prepare for and receive the transplant. This required additional strong chemotherapy treatments to disable his immune system so his body would be receptive to the transplanted stem cells.

When the time came, the transplant was as easy as an injection of the cells into his blood stream via the catheter in his chest.

The most challenging days of the entire transplantation process were the ones immediately after the transplant, when his body, depleted of an immune system, had not yet begun reaping the benefits of the transplanted cells.

“I went a little crazy,” Matrisciano said. “I think I owe a lot of people an apology.”

One of those people is Marge, who — he would later learn when he insisted on being told how he behaved because he had no memory of that “crazy” period — tried to stop him from yanking the surgically-implanted catheter from his chest.

When Marge attempted to stop him, he was not her usual, good-natured husband.

“You’ve never talked to me like that,” Marge told him as he discussed the incident. “It was like having a little kid — stop that!”

Marge deferred to the male nurse who was stronger and able to prevent Matrisciano from pulling out the catheter.

Matrisciano moved beyond the “crazy” stage into three days of not being able to eat because everything tasted so horrible.

Briefly, feeling miserable, he wondered if he was going to make it through the treatment.

Then he began to improve.

He was monitored constantly, his blood checked every hour so doctors could catch any complication in the earliest stages. When his doctor found white blood cells beginning to form, he gave Matrisciano the thumbs up.

“You’re in, kid,” Matrisciano remembers being told. “That’s what shows the transplant worked.”

….. But a funny thing happened as he and Marge were leaving the hospital: Matrisciano’s hair began falling out.

They had been told to expect it because of the chemo he’d undergone prior to the transplant, but they had not expected it to happen in a public place. They quickly made the decision to go to the on-premises hair salon to have his hair clipped close to the scalp.

“I didn’t care about being bald,” Matrisciano said. He was too happy to be alive and headed toward improvement. He did, however, do a double take when he looked in the mirror.

“Have my ears always stuck out like that?” he asked.

“I don’t think I ever saw him lose his sense of humor,” Marge said.

Matrisciano has improved steadily in the five months since the transplant.

“They say that in 90 to 100 days you should start feeling well,” Matrisciano said. “For me it was 60 to 65 days.”

After taking antibiotics for about a month, he was taken off all cancer medications.

“I feel better now than I have felt in eight years,” Matrisciano said.

….. Because of the type of cancer he had, Matrisciano cannot say he’s cured.

“The best thing they can call me is ‘in remission,’” he said.

But he’s alive and feeling great.

“I look at the bright side now. I thank God every day that I’m here,” he said.

And, although he always loved his wife of 31 years, he is doubly appreciative to have her in his life now.

“She’s my rock,” he said. “She wouldn’t leave my side. I think my wife suffered more than I did. She had to watch me go through it.”

He is hopeful about the future.

“They performed a miracle on me,” he said. “I just hope it lasts a while.”

“Prayer,” Marge said, “got us a long way.”’

….. Sam Matrisciano takes full blame for not going to doctors sooner with his persistent fatigue. He now believes that his cancer could have been found much earlier — before he moved to Florida, when he was diligent about annual exams — if doctors had looked more closely at an indicating factor on his blood tests during his annual checkups.

A review of his records showed that his level of C-reactive protein, a marker for multiple myeloma had been gradually changing for several years.

“If you’re not a hematologist, you don’t catch it,” Marge Matrisciano said.

“If anyone has the same symptoms I had, especially if they’ve been diagnosed with anemia, they should see a hematologist,” Matrisciano said.