Bailey's Story (Part Two)
We hired a private detective
twice, as well as got advice from a pet detective, persuaded three TV
stations and two newspapers to report stories about our search for Bailey's
family, paid $255.00 for a newspaper add, made phone calls, sent letters
and e-mails, searched the Internet extensively, and made home
visits in order to accomplish our goal of finding her a donor match.
Each time I located one of
Bailey's relatives I told their owner about what we were trying to
do for Bailey, and managed to persuade each owner to take their dog
to their veterinarian for a blood sample. No one turned me down!
I needed a blood sample from
at least one of Bailey's parents (her father was deceased) in order
for the doctor back East who did the matching to even do the testing.
I found two sisters, Brandi (Seattle) and Juels (Olympia)
without much trouble ,even though Juels had changed owners twice, and
some half siblings.
It took me nearly three months
to locate Maddie, Bailey's mother. At first, I only had a first
name of the new owner, Connie, and the fact that he lived in Enumclaw,
WA. When a break came in learning Connie's last name, we went
to his address only to find out that we had missed him by six weeks.
He had packed up his dogs and left for parts unknown in Nebraska.
We hired a private detective
to help us find Connie, and one week later, on a Wednesday, I
sent a letter to the new owners of his house. I was at school
the following Monday expecting news from the detective when my phone
rang and the voice on the other end said that he was Connie. The
letter that I had sent to the new owners at his old address had been
forwarded to him in Nebraska. After being given Maddie four years
earlier, he still had her and was willing to help us (sadly, I found
out recently that six weeks after I had located them, Maddie disappeared
on a hunting trip) However, now that I had found Maddie, we could have
Brandi and Juels tested.
We were disappointed to learn
in September that neither Brandi nor Juels proved to be a match-- each
sibling has a one in four chance of being a successful match.
Dr. Sullivan told us he might have to do an autalogous transplant
(using Bailey's own stem cells while she was in remission). She did
undergo a seventeen- week round of chemotherapy and was in remission.
The disadvantage of this type of transplant is that the chance of recovery
drops from 70% to 30%. I did not like the sound of these odds--I
wanted Bailey to have an allogenic transplant. We needed to find
her a donor match!