A Life Renewed: One Man's Victory Over Cancer
Watch 68-year-old Albert Yu’s vigorous swing of a tennis racket and it’s hard to imagine that he is the veteran of some tough years of chemotherapy and radiation, the kind often prescribed to beat back cancer. He plays with determined control and balance, keeping up even when he’s challenged by a steady stream of machine-fed balls.
Albert Yu came through months of treatment that gave him a new immune system. Now, two years after the transplant that fought his cancer, he and
his wife, Mary Bechmann Yu, are living a life
renewed.
Just two years ago, Yu could barely get up out of a chair. He was at the end of an exhausting eight years of battle against lymphoma. That’s a cancer that hits white blood cells and distorts their ability to protect the body from bacteria and disease. His physicians at Stanford Hospital had used the most advanced therapies available, even enrolling Yu in clinical trials of experimental treatments. The cancer would go away for a little bit, Yu said, then it would come back. It became more and more obvious, said his wife, Mary Bechmann Yu, “that the remissions were getting shorter and shorter and that we needed to rethink our strategy.”
Replacing Yu’s exhausted immune system with a transplant was the avenue his Stanford physicians suggested, a version of a whole system do-over first accomplished in 1956 by replacing a patient’s diseased bone marrow with healthy marrow from his identical twin.
His Stanford physicians offered Yu a new treatment called, for short, TLI/ATG. The letters represent a two-part approach to manipulating the behavior of the immune system.
As it does with every patient, the BMT program creates a team of physicians who coordinated Yu’s care.―His group included his original oncologist, Ron Levy, MD; his chief transplant physician, Wen-Kai Weng, MD; and radiation oncologist Rich Hoppe, MD.
“You get to know everybody there,” Yu said, “and after a while, they’re like family.”
Yu’s treatment protocol allowed him to be physically conditioned and then transplanted almost completely without hospitalization, in comparison to the weeks of isolation behind double doors that some transplant patients must endure. But the treatment still requires juggling a complex set of interconnected events designed to push his immune system down to zero while keeping him from becoming infected. He was vulnerable to even one stray germ, his wife said. “It was a little bit like walking a tightrope and he was so fragile.”
Yu said his wife made an extraordinary effort to make their home a totally clean place. They also asked to consult with someone who’d gone through the same procedure. Stanford made that introduction. Hearing about the experience first-hand, said Mary Bechmann Yu, “turned out to be a tremendous resource, medically and emotionally.”
When, finally, Yu sat in a reclining chair at Stanford’s Cancer Center so the transplant cells could flow through an IV into his arm, it was almost a non-event, Yu said. “They just bring in a bag and injected it into my vein. But it was very emotional for me. I felt somebody gave me life.”
Over the next nine months, as his new immune system built its ability to function at full strength, Yu took life slowly. Every day, he went to the Cancer Center where nurses would draw his blood, test it and give him additional treatments. “Then I’d receive whatever was needed that day to try to normalize my blood chemistry,” Yu said, “and keep me going while I healed and until I could make immune cells on my own.”
The TLI/ATG protocol produces such a long-lasting impact on the immune system that Yu does not need additional daily medication to suppress his immune system. He has also worked to regain his muscle tone and cardiovascular stamina, enrolling in an exercise class and working out with weights. In addition to tennis, he’s also swimming and playing golf.
“I feel that once you’ve had cancer, I don’t think you want to say you can be cured for sure. On the other hand, there’s no point in thinking about it,” Yu said. “We’re way more conscious about how we spend our time,” said his wife. “We have a very different yardstick to our calendar.”
About Stanford Hospital & Clinics
Stanford Hospital & Clinics is known worldwide for advanced treatment of complex disorders in areas such as cardiovascular care, cancer treatment, neurosciences, surgery, and organ transplants. Consistently ranked among the top institutions in the U.S. News & World Report annual list of "America's Best Hospitals," Stanford Hospital & Clinics is internationally recognized for translating medical breakthroughs into the care of patients. It is part of the Stanford University Medical Center, along with the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. For more information, visit http://stanfordmedicine.org.