Donor sought to help Hilo 3-year-old beat cancer

There are thousands of cancer patients nationwide waiting for the bone marrow transplant that will help see them through to recovery.

One of them is 3-year-old Chelten Arruda of Hilo.

Chelten was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in March. After months of high-dose chemotherapy and dozens of trips to Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children on Oahu, he entered remission in August. His family now is seeking a bone marrow donor who can help Chelten through the next phase of curing his cancer.

A bone marrow donor drive will be held Saturday during the annual University of Hawaii at Hilo health fair.

“It’s very important not just to sign up people, but to education people on the need for donors,” said Roy Yonashiro, a recruitment specialist with the Honolulu-based Hawaii Bone Marrow Donor Registry.

“What we’re trying to do is build up the registry so that for someone like Chelten — they don’t have to wait for a donor,” Yonashiro said. “Seventy-eight percent of patients … who need transplants can’t find donors in their family.”

The family’s search for a matching donor is particularly challenging because of Chelten’s mixed-ethnicity background (Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Filipino, German, Spanish, Puerto Rican and Native American).

“For him to get a match, somebody would have to match what he has pretty closely, which is really hard to find,” said Chelten’s mother, Christy Nachor.

Sibling matches occur only 25 percent of the time, but doctors thought that Chelten’s 2-year-old brother might be a fit because of the boys’ similarity in age. Still, tissue samples didn’t turn up the needed matching protein markers.

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer that occurs when the body produces too many lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell). It makes up about 5 percent of childhood cancer cases, according to the American Cancer Society, and is particularly uncommon in children under age 3.

“They don’t have many cases of kids his age getting it, especially with the way it presented,” Nachor said.

Chelten’s cancer was in his spine. He was misdiagnosed initially with a different type of rare cancer — a sarcoma. Diagnosticians didn’t find the spinal tumor at first on CT scans; it wasn’t until Nachor told doctors that Chelten was having trouble walking that radiologists took a second look.

“He had constipation and pain because the tumor was compressing his spine to where it was paralyzing his intestines,” Nachor said. “They said if they didn’t get to it right away, he would be paralyzed.”

The toddler went into emergency surgery that day — a four-hour procedure for him and a nerve-wracking experience for his parents.

“We literally just found out about it a half-hour (earlier), and then there he was in surgery,” Nachor said. Five days later, Arruda started chemotherapy.

“He’s matured a lot, you can tell,” his mother said. “He doesn’t act like his cousins that are his age.”

Early in the process, when the family was spending more time on Oahu, Chelten had trouble coping with the change in environment.

“It’s because we’ve been away from home for so long,” Nachor said.

“He’d start acting up every time we’d go to the hospital. Now he’s OK with it because we’re there for three to six days, and then we come home for three weeks.”

“When he’s home, he totally forgets about everything hospital,” she said.

By August, MRI scans turned up tumor-free. Chelten still gets maintenance doses of chemotherapy to keep the cancer in remission.

The next step is finding the bone marrow match. Transplants can only be done in the remission stage.

Chelten’s parents are half-matches with their son, but “a random stranger could match more,” Nachor said. It’s that match that they are hoping to find through the donor drive.

“You never know who it’s going to be for,” Yonashiro said. “We’re trying to encourage the community — don’t wait until it’s someone you know. When you see an opportunity to help somebody, take it.”

The Hawaii Bone Marrow Donor Registry will hold a donor drive Saturday at the University of Hawaii at Hilo College of Pharmacy’s annual health fair.

The fair takes place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Prince Kuhio Plaza.

People interested in being a bone marrow donor must be between the ages of 18 and 44.

For more information, visit www.bonemarrowhawaii.com.

Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune -herald.com.