Leukemia sidelines woman

A fundraiser is set from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.

By JEANNE STARMACK

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

CANFIELD — Lori Grisdale Marsh isn’t sitting around feeling sorry for herself — she’s not the type, she says, who takes bad news by burying her head in a pillow.

She is sitting around more than usual, though, at her Talsman Drive home.

The normally active 46-year-old woman isn’t going to her gym. She’s not going to her job as a hair stylist at Panache in Boardman. She’s not going for a run, although a walk is OK. She has her treadmill.

She also has her phone, which rings all day long, so she isn’t bored. Friends come by. They take her for rides “just to get out of the house.”

And she goes to appointments for blood tests once a week.

It’s weird staying home so much, she acknowledges. “I never know what day it is,” she said. “I wake up and think — do I have an appointment today? I used to be so structured. I did all my things — boom, boom, boom. It all changes in a flash.”

Life changes when you get the diagnosis — acute myleogenous leukemia. That cancer, which begins inside bone marrow, eventually stops the marrow from doing its job in helping to fight infections.

“I can’t be around germs,” she said.

She got her diagnosis in July when, rundown and sick, she went to St. Elizabeth Health Center. A woman at the mall recently had told her she makes a beautiful pregnant lady.

“That’s how swollen my spleen was.”

The diagnosis came three years after she began a battle with polycythemia vera, a blood disorder that causes marrow to make an abnormal amount of blood cells. PCV took a nasty turn, as it sometimes does, to AML.

It was devastating to hear it, she said, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to go through everything she’d have to do to fight the disease.

But she thought about her parents, Canfield residents Janet and Kenneth Grisdale. A year and a half ago, they lost their other daughter, Kathy Grisdale Lewis, 45, to ovarian cancer.

“She lived in Canfield, too. We’re so close. She went fast — six weeks after her diagnosis.”

“I said to the doctor, ‘Do what you have to do. I’m gonna make it.’”

She went from St. E’s to the Cleveland Clinic, where she stayed for six weeks on the leukemia floor. She underwent chemotherapy treatment and then blood transfusions. She came home and is holding her own.

They don’t call it remission, she said. Her once-a-week tests have come back clear. She’ll go back to Cleveland next week for a full checkup.

To cure her AML, Grisdale Marsh will have to have a full bone marrow transplant. Her previous blood disorder complicated matters, making her ineligible for a minitransplant in which a marrow donor doesn’t have to be a perfect match.

She needs a perfect match. Her remaining sibling, brother Kenneth of Poland, is not one. The search has expanded to an international list of potential donors, and she has heard that doctors selected five from the list for further tests. Now, she’s expecting one of the many phone calls she gets to be from the Cleveland Clinic. She’s hoping one of those five people will be the one.

She keeps looking forward to life after the transplant, which will keep her in Cleveland for four months.

“I know I’ll get through it. I got good little grandkids to come back and see,” she said.

Trinity, 5, and Cameron, 4, live in Canfield also with their parents — Grisdale Marsh’s son, Chad, and his wife, Angie.

She has no health insurance to pay for the transplant or any of her other care. Her ex-husband’s policy continued to cover her for awhile after her divorce, but she couldn’t get her own because of the PCV.

She also needs help paying daily living expenses since she can’t work. Her family helps, and there has been one fundraiser at Panache.

There will be another Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. at the Embassy, 5030 Youngstown-Poland Road. Karen Naffah, a friend of Grisdale Marsh’s, who organized it, says it will be a family event. It will include a pasta dinner, a DJ, entertainment, door prizes and auction items. Thirteen items have been donated from retired NFL players, and everyone who buys a ticket will be entered to win a flat-screen TV.

Grisdale Marsh appreciates all the effort on her behalf. “I can’t thank them enough — however you can word that,” she said.

She’d like to be at the Embassy “just to hug everyone.”

But it’s virus season. She can’t risk going into a crowd, even at her own benefit dinner.

starmack@vindy.com