Tulane center Christian Montano, a grad transfer from Brown, donated his bone marrow in February of 2018 to a cancer patient, Jim Calhoun, and saved his life. Calhoun will attend the Army game on Oct. 5, and I will have a story in The Advocate about the whole deal before then. It's quite the story. Here's what Montano said about the process when I talked to him on Media Day.
Can you talk about how that all came about?
"It was though an organization called Be The Match. We started doing that at Brown a number of years ago when one of the offensive linemen, Lawrence Rubida, was diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma (a type of cancer; Rubida, a former team captain, died in 2005). So we did two events. One in the fall was called Bench Press for Cancer, where you get a sponsor. Then in the spring we do a match and we do the mouth swab drive. Every year we go on the campus and try to get as many people to sign up as we could. So my freshman year I signed up for that and didn't hear anything for three years. Then they called me right before Thanksgiving (of 2017) and said, hey, we think you're a match for someone, would you be willing to come back and do a secondary testing to confirm you're the best available match. I said, yes, of course. I did that right after I got back from Thanksgiving break, and then right before Christmas they said, hey, you are our best person overall to do it. Would you be willing to. I said yes and then Feb. 1 of 2018 I did the donation."
What's happened since then?
"There's a one-year no-contact period. Obviously the patient's still very sick because on the day of the donation they basically radiate their immune system to the point where they have nothing left, so it's kind of their most compromised space. After a year they are supposed to be healthy again if everything went well. So around early February this year I got a phone call from Jim (Calhoun). He said I was your recipient. We just talked for close to a a half-hour, 40 minutes about it."
How old was he?
"He was 43 at the time. He is from upstate New York."
What's happened since the phone call?
"I got to meet him briefly in May when I went back home. They came down and visited our house for a weekend and visited me and my family, but we text probably on a daily basis now, just shoot messages back and forth. It's pretty cool. He's also going to come to our Army game up in New York. It's awesome. It's really cool to get to know him and his family."
What was it like when you first met him?
"It was really emotional when we first met. We've talked about it. I have a second chance at football here, and it was his second chance at life really. If you are over a certain age, he was just over by a matter of months where they no longer consider chemotherapy and radiation a treatment option. Bone marrow transplants are the only option with the cancer he had."
What cancer did he have?
"It's called ALL. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (a type of blood cancer), but it's typically a child's cancer so if you're over 42 years old, your only chance is bone marrow they say."
What is his prognosis now?
'He's been clean (since the transplant). He's had no problems. I think he said it's two years post-transplant, but if there are no complications, they'll consider you cured. He's about halfway there."
What was the effect on you?
"Minimal. There are two ways to do it. One's through your blood. They run it through a machine. I forget the name of them, I think it's allergenic. There's that way through the blood and the other way's through the bone marrow, so I did it through the hip, which is an actual surgical operation. You go to general anaesthesia. They use needles to draw it out from the hip crest. It took about 2 1/2 hours. You wake up pretty sore because they had to really gut it into the bone, but after maybe a week or so you feel pretty normal."
So you were fine by a week?
"I was back in the gym doing light stuff about a week-and-a-half later and I was good to go, about a month I was a hundred percent."
Can you talk about how that all came about?
"It was though an organization called Be The Match. We started doing that at Brown a number of years ago when one of the offensive linemen, Lawrence Rubida, was diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma (a type of cancer; Rubida, a former team captain, died in 2005). So we did two events. One in the fall was called Bench Press for Cancer, where you get a sponsor. Then in the spring we do a match and we do the mouth swab drive. Every year we go on the campus and try to get as many people to sign up as we could. So my freshman year I signed up for that and didn't hear anything for three years. Then they called me right before Thanksgiving (of 2017) and said, hey, we think you're a match for someone, would you be willing to come back and do a secondary testing to confirm you're the best available match. I said, yes, of course. I did that right after I got back from Thanksgiving break, and then right before Christmas they said, hey, you are our best person overall to do it. Would you be willing to. I said yes and then Feb. 1 of 2018 I did the donation."
What's happened since then?
"There's a one-year no-contact period. Obviously the patient's still very sick because on the day of the donation they basically radiate their immune system to the point where they have nothing left, so it's kind of their most compromised space. After a year they are supposed to be healthy again if everything went well. So around early February this year I got a phone call from Jim (Calhoun). He said I was your recipient. We just talked for close to a a half-hour, 40 minutes about it."
How old was he?
"He was 43 at the time. He is from upstate New York."
What's happened since the phone call?
"I got to meet him briefly in May when I went back home. They came down and visited our house for a weekend and visited me and my family, but we text probably on a daily basis now, just shoot messages back and forth. It's pretty cool. He's also going to come to our Army game up in New York. It's awesome. It's really cool to get to know him and his family."
What was it like when you first met him?
"It was really emotional when we first met. We've talked about it. I have a second chance at football here, and it was his second chance at life really. If you are over a certain age, he was just over by a matter of months where they no longer consider chemotherapy and radiation a treatment option. Bone marrow transplants are the only option with the cancer he had."
What cancer did he have?
"It's called ALL. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (a type of blood cancer), but it's typically a child's cancer so if you're over 42 years old, your only chance is bone marrow they say."
What is his prognosis now?
'He's been clean (since the transplant). He's had no problems. I think he said it's two years post-transplant, but if there are no complications, they'll consider you cured. He's about halfway there."
What was the effect on you?
"Minimal. There are two ways to do it. One's through your blood. They run it through a machine. I forget the name of them, I think it's allergenic. There's that way through the blood and the other way's through the bone marrow, so I did it through the hip, which is an actual surgical operation. You go to general anaesthesia. They use needles to draw it out from the hip crest. It took about 2 1/2 hours. You wake up pretty sore because they had to really gut it into the bone, but after maybe a week or so you feel pretty normal."
So you were fine by a week?
"I was back in the gym doing light stuff about a week-and-a-half later and I was good to go, about a month I was a hundred percent."
