TOUGH: Robin shows off an elastic band Tuesday that covers the intravenous port where she gets medication. (AP)
TOUGH: Robin shows off an elastic band Tuesday that covers the intravenous port where she gets medication. (
)
Last April, when doctors first suspected that “Good Morning America” host Robin Roberts may have contracted a rare blood disease from the chemotherapy treatments she took for breast cancer, she showed up at her mother’s house with a bag full of cheek swabs.
The swabs were to test her family to see if one of them could — if worse came to worst — be a bone-marrow donor.
Robin’s oldest sister, Sally-Ann, who anchors a morning show on the CBS station in New Orleans, says she and a friend made a prayer circle around the test kit.
“We prayed: ‘Please let this be a match,’ ” Sally-Ann told The Post yesterday.
And it worked.
Sally-Ann is going to be Robin’s sole bone-marrow donor for a series of treatments later this year.
On Tuesday, Robin appeared on “GMA” with a purple band around her arm — masking the intravenous port where she is taking medication since being diagnosed with MDS — myelodysplastic syndrome — last spring.
The blood disorder was likely caused by the chemotherapy treatments that saved her life from breast cancer in 2007.
“I didn’t know how rare it is for a person to find a match in their family,” Sally-Ann says.
The odds are something like 1-in-4 that a sibling will be a match — less than 1-in-3 that anyone in a family will be a candidate, she says.
“I’m the big sister,” she says. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be the one suffering because of age.
“But that’s not the way it is.”
Sally-Ann says it “felt like an eternity” for test results to come back — though it was only a week or two.
When Robin called her in early May, “I thought, if it’s good news, she would say it right away.
“I was starting to feel a little anxious because she was starting to talk about other things. I was driving home and, as soon as I pulled up into the driveway, she said: ‘Oh, by the way, we’re a match,’ and I let out a whoop.”
In the weeks after, Robin forbade Sally-Ann from going online to read about the disease.
“Robin told me it might be depressing because it looks bad,” she says. Wait for a final diagnosis, Robin said.
On May 9, doctors confirmed it was MDS, a secret Robin kept from all but a small circle of friends and colleagues until the emotional announcement on “GMA” June 11.
The bone-marrow donation process, Sally-Ann says, will require her five days of injections to increase her blood-cell production.
With needles in both arms, her blood will run through a machine that separates out her healing stem cells.
The cells will then be injected into Robin in hopes it will repair the damaged marrow.
“The way it is explained to me is that they will first have to knock out her immune system in order for my stem cells to be accepted by her body,” says Sally-Ann.
“It’s up to the doctors to deem when that is.
“I just want this to be over with so my sister can resume her life as usual,” she says.