Two Pints a Month

Helen Maysey was a sickly baby. She had a stubborn anemia that did not respond to treatment with iron and vitamins. By the time she was three, doctors found her spleen enlarged, decided that this versatile organ, which both makes and destroys blood cells, was overdoing the destructive part of its job. Surgeons took out her spleen. That gave only temporary relief, and Helen had to have repeated transfusions to keep her stock of red blood cells anywhere near normal. When she was ten, doctors figured that Helen had about two months to live. That was 17 years ago, but she fooled them. Later, a surgeon, removing her gall bladder at St. Louis' Christian Hospital, found seven satellite spleens scattered through her body, hopefully took them all out.

Helen was kept in the Mothers and Babies' Home attached to the hospital so that she could have continuous medical care, frequent lab tests, and the ever-necessary transfusions. As she grew up, Helen helped with the younger children, worked in the office, developed a cheery personality that belied her tenuous hold on life. Every two months (in recent years) she has received four pints of blood, a half-pint on alternate days to cut down the severity of her chills-and-fever reaction to transfusions. She has responded surprisingly well to the transfusion routine. "It still hurts, but I'm a good girl about it," she says. Understandably, Helen was poster girl for the 1956 American Red Cross blood drive.

Last week, after 1,868 days in the hospital, off and on (the hospital figures the cost of all this free care at $36,962.15), and after 1,539 transfusions of blood donated by the Red Cross, Helen Maysey, 27, married Shirley (Red) Andrus, 36, an electrician. Although her disease has many of the earmarks of Mediterranean anemia, which appears in successive generations in Italy and eastern Mediterranean countries, there is no history of this anemia in her family, no evidence whether she would pass it on to her children.

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