South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Facing leukemia, a Florida dad hoped for a stranger’s help
TAMPA — He didn’t know what to tell Emily.
His daughter knew something was wrong, knew he had gone to the hospital. She thought her dad was just exhausted from traveling to Peru, Hawaii and Seattle to shoot a documentary.
From her dorm room in Gainesville, Florida, Emily kept calling.
Bob Croslin, who was 47, rehearsed the words: Cancer — Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Chemotherapy. Bone marrow biopsies. Blood transfusions. Hope?
If you had been diagnosed with this 20 years ago, his doctor said, you’d have been dead in six months.
“We’ll figure this out,” said Bob’s wife, Leslie. Together, they called their daughter.
“Those doctors must be wrong,” Emily said.
Bob was riding his bike 100 miles a week, shooting pictures for Sports Illustrated, Bicycling Magazine, the Wall Street Journal. He was the fittest he’s ever been.
“It can’t be,” Emily kept sobbing that October evening in 2018. “It just can’t be that bad.”
Bob used to be a photographer at the Tampa Bay Times. I enjoyed working with him a decade ago, before he left to freelance.
Though we didn’t hang outside of the newspaper, we followed each other online. I watched his daughter Emily grow up. And him face cancer. He hopes someone who reads his story might be able to save some stranger’s life. While Bob endured chemo at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, and Emily worried through her senior year at the University of Florida, Leslie spent long hours researching blood cancers.
She learned that Bob’s form of leukemia is rare. About 20,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with it each year. It causes the bone marrow to make massive amounts of abnormal blood cells. Bob’s oncologist told him, “We’re going to give you so much chemo you’ll wish you were dead.”
“Bring it on,” Bob said. Anything to see Emily graduate, get a job, adopt the dog she had always wanted.
At the hospital, he slumped in a chair while chemicals pumped into his veins. He threw up blood. The chemo fried his esophagus. He lost 25 pounds.
Leslie took care of him, while still teaching fifthgrade math at Berkeley Prep.
Emily called every day. Every time, Bob broke down.
In December, he spiked a fever. He watched his daughter graduate in Gainesville via livestream on his phone, from the intensive care unit.
Time slowed down for Bob, who seldom slowed down. He doesn’t remember early 2019, except from photos other people took.
For the first time, he wasn’t the one chronicling the journey. Maybe, he thought, his cancer came from all those chemicals he’d had his hands in, and inhaled, in darkrooms. So many of his photographer friends also had been diagnosed with cancer and brain diseases.
Maybe it doesn’t matter, Leslie kept telling him. She wanted to study, focus on the future. In the spring of 2019, he started biking again. In May, he felt strong enough to go to Gainesville to see Emily receive her master’s degree. He photographed his daughter on the same campus where he’d graduated with her mother more than two decades before.
He began to think, maybe, he could reclaim his life. But at the end of summer — just as Emily was starting a job at Raymond James and Leslie was heading back to school — the cancer came back.
“This time,” Bob told Leslie, “it’s going to kill me.”
Beside his bed at Moffitt, she searched. She found support groups for overwhelmed caregivers. And dire statistics which seemed like death sentences.
Then she started reading about stem cell transplants.
Chemotherapy can kill some leukemia cells. But it can’t completely eradicate them, said Dr. Ahmad Shaker of St. Anthony’s Hospital.
When he first diagnosed Bob, the oncologist had mentioned a potential stem cell transplant, but hoped Bob wouldn’t need one.
Even if you find a donor, the doctor told Bob, you have only a 50 percent chance of surviving two years.
Early stem cell transplants in the 1950s required that donors be a relative. Using long needles, doctors would draw bone marrow from the donor’s pelvis and inject it into the patient, hoping the good cells would overtake the bad. The risk of complications — and death — were high. Then, in 1979, a doctor desperate to save his 10-yearold daughter let surgeons perform the first transplant from an unrelated donor.
When it worked, the door opened for people to save strangers. Someone on the other side of the world, it turns out, could have DNA that more closely matches yours than your parents’.
By 1987, more than 10,000 people had swabbed their cheeks and sent DNA to the National Bone Marrow Donor Registry. By 2020, Be the Match included 39 million potential donors.
That same year, 6,467 people got transplants.
“I’d never heard of it,” Leslie said.
These days, donors sit for eight hours, an IV in one arm, while a machine removes blood and separates the blood-forming cells doctors need. Then the machine pumps the blood back into the donor’s body, explained Dr. Rawan Faramand, Bob’s oncologist at Moffitt.
She told him that chances of finding a match are 29% to 79%, depending on ethnicity. White guys like Bob have a better chance, with more donors in that demographic.
Even so, one in five people don’t survive the transplant.
“Give me the paperwork,” Bob told Leslie.
Many of Bob and Leslie’s friends were too old to sign up for the registry. Donors are supposed to be 18 to 35.
But Emily rallied her followers on social media, got at least a dozen people to join Be the Match and sent away for her own DNA kit.
“Why wouldn’t you?” she asked.
In October 2019, a year after his first round of chemo, Bob came home to wait. His best bet for a match would have been a biological sibling, but his sister was adopted.
“It was hard not to think that there might be one person out there with a similar genetic make-up who could keep me alive for another year, or the rest of my life,” Bob said.
He kept picturing Emily getting married, buying a house, becoming a mother.
In Europe, and countries with socialized medicine, almost everyone sends in their DNA, said Shaker, the St. Anthony’s doctor. Here, the registry is not nearly as well-known as organ donations, and only one in 220 potential donors ever make a match.
“It ’s frustrating, heart-breaking to know that there’s someone out there somewhere who could save your patient,” said Shaker. “We can only hope they’re on that registry.”
He only had to wait a couple weeks for the call. Doctors had wanted 10 out of 12 DNA markers to line up.
Bob’s potential donor had all 12.
“Genetically perfect!” his oncologist said.
The anonymous donor agreed to go in immediately.
Bob and Leslie ate Thanksgiving dinner from the hospital cafeteria, waiting for the stranger’s donation.
“We’ve been told that your stem cells are in the air,” a nurse had told them.
“From where?” asked Leslie.
A nurse told her, “Europe.” Bob spent the next day in bed while the donor’s stem cells replaced his own. He calls Nov. 22 his “rebirth day.”
And in February 2020, Bob got to go home. Then the world shut down. Emily moved into the studio apartment at her parents’ house near Crescent Lake. She adopted a Corgi — Winston.
Every morning, Bob and his daughter had coffee and walked the dog. Stolen time.
Those two spring months, Bob said, were the greatest gift. He couldn’t stop thinking about the stranger who had shared his cells.
“I’d lost hope in humanity, hope for myself,” he said. “This forced me to realize there are amazing people in this world.”
Then, a soul-crusher: Leukemia cells were sneaking back into his blood. He would need a “top-off” infusion. Would the donor be willing to give more?
Why would some stranger give him another chance? “I would,” Emily said. That May, Bob’s donor came through again.
For the next year, Bob was nauseous, tired, irritable. He took 12 anti-rejection medications and a chemo pill every day. For five days each month, he got chemo shots.
“You can’t do anything but lie in bed. You forget what it feels like to feel well,” Bob said. “But ... it’s better than not being around.”
Slowly, he started pedaling through Alafia River State Park, 25 miles at a time. And he started booking photo shoots, never more than a week ahead.
“You just do maintenance as long as you can,” he said. “And be grateful for every extra day you get.”
One night in September 2021, Emily got the call she had been hoping for. A woman in south Florida needed her stem cells. She was 72, just like her grandmother. And had leukemia, just like her dad. At Thanksgiving last year, three years after her dad’s diagnosis, Emily started taking shots to stimulate the production of her blood stem cells. For five days, her grandmother put the needle in Emily’s thigh, which ached and made her feel like she had the flu. She told herself it was only a tiny bit of the pain her dad went through.
In 2020 alone, stem cell donations saved 6,467 people.