In Parker's case his sisters couldn't donate but they luckily found a stranger match. “We’re just trying to make up for all the lost time.” When children need bone marrow transplants their siblings are often the best match. “It just feels great having us all under one roof and I finally feel like I got my family back,” Green said. Sometimes family needs to stay close to the hospital for three months after the transplant just to make sure everything is OK, but Parker was doing so well he went home. “He actually took to it very, very well.” “He is actually 98% donor cells, which means he has 98% of the donor cells and only 2% of his original cells,” Green said. What’s more, the transplant was overwhelmingly successful. He was down and out.”īut he slowly started smiling and cooing again and acting more like himself. He got a little spoiled and attached,” Green said. “I held him all the time because he was not feeling well. At the end of June, he returned to Children's National Hospital for chemotherapy, to kill his remaining T-cells, and the bone marrow transplant, to give him a new immune system. Green’s daughters, Natalie, 12 and Avery, 6, should have been “the best possible” matches but they were not and Parker needed an unrelated donor. Courtesy Tiffany Greenīut he didn’t have any infections and he was cleared for the procedure as soon as they found a bone marrow match. After this procedure, babies often need to stay close to the hospital for months, but Parker was doing so well he went home early.

“The biggest thing for me was having this new baby and looking at him and not really knowing if our time was going to be cut short.” To help Parker develop an immune system, doctors gave him chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant.

That’s where the transplant comes in.”įor Green, hearing that her infant son needed to undergo chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant just months after his birth was overwhelming. “The only way we can do that is actually replacing their blood with someone else’s blood that has white blood cells that work normally. “The only way to really prevent infection is to give the kid an immune system,” he said. A bone marrow transplant is one form of treatment that can give children a chance to live a long, healthy life. It is genetic, but in about 15% of cases doctors do not understand what gene causes the SCID. Luckily, it’s “quite rare,” occurring in about 1 in 60,000 births. Parker was born without an immune system but luckily doctors caught it during regular newborn screenings and he underwent treatment to help him. “Kids are prone to infections and actually over 90% of them are going to die in their first year of life due to an overwhelming infection unless we do something about it,” Dávila said.

What does scid mean