Commentary: Office Visit: A life lesson

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Dec 12, 2007 by Stephen Prescott

Too often, it's easy to forget that medical research is about more than science. More than commercial development. More than progress.

Of course, each is an essential element of what happens every day at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. But when these elements coalesce, they can change lives. Just ask Rayna DuBose.

It was April 2002, and Rayna had just wrapped up her freshman season on the Virginia Tech women's basketball team. One afternoon, before hitting the books to study for finals, she decided to get in an off-season workout.

However, by the time she was finished in the weight room, Rayna was wiped out. In the locker room, she lay down on a couch and fell asleep. With her friends' help, she dragged herself to study hall, propping herself up against the wall the whole way. When an academic adviser found her sprawled on the floor, sweating buckets, Rayna was whisked by ambulance to a nearby hospital.

Doctors diagnosed her with bacterial meningitis. Then sepsis, a deadly blood infection, took hold. Rayna slipped into a coma, and her physicians didn't know whether she'd ever emerge. Her vital organs began to shut down, and gangrene set in, turning her extremities completely black.

When traditional sepsis treatments - antibiotics, fluids, a ventilator - failed to stem the illness, her physicians turned to a new medication: Xigris. It was the last, best chance to save her young life.

Through more than a decade's worth of research at OMRF, Chuck Esmon and Fletcher Taylor had discovered a method of controlling the body's blood-clotting cascade. The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly built on this research to create Xigris, and after eight years of clinical trials, it became the first - and only - of more than 20 experimental drugs to obtain FDA approval for the treatment of severe sepsis.

It's hard to know exactly what saved Rayna's life. But after she was treated with Xigris, something unexpected happened: Rayna woke up.

Soon she was speaking. Her brain and other vital organs appeared, surprisingly, undamaged. "It was a great a moment, and we were full of joy," said her mother.

But it was far from a perfect moment.

The prolonged loss of circulation to Rayna's extremities had caused the tissue in her hands and feet to die. Her tissues had literally mummified. So surgeons had to amputate her hands and feet. The road since has been long and hard. But Rayna has not surrendered. Far from it.

Rayna was fitted for prosthetics and learned to walk, to dress herself, to feed herself. Even to drive. She returned to school, where she served as a student assistant coach on the basketball team. And this past spring, she graduated from Virginia Tech. After graduation, Rayna got an apartment with a friend and a part-time job as a study-hall monitor. She hits the gym three times a week. And she's been working on her Web site (raynadubose.net) and building toward a longer-term goal: a career as a motivational speaker.

Later this winter, OMRF will host Rayna as her motivational speaking career makes its Oklahoma debut. I'm looking forward to meeting this remarkable young woman.

When I do, I'll thank her for reminding us why we do what we do. Why we must translate our basic discoveries into new treatments for human disease. And why we must keep doing better.

Stephen Prescott is president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and can be reached at OMRF-President@omrf.org.