Climber Tristan Chen Treated for Leukemia at CU Cancer Center

When your life is about being outside — about making your approach up and round advanced rock formations, in search of that move you get into as each foothold and ledge reveals itself — the final place you need to be is caught in a hospital mattress, enduring the unwanted side effects of chemotherapy.

But that’s simply the place Colorado rock climber Tristan Chen — well-known world wide for his mastery of the artwork of bouldering — discovered himself within the spring of 2022. After noticing that his fingertips had been beginning to bruise simply simply from grabbing the perimeters of rocks, and that his gums had been nonetheless bleeding from a dental process he’d had weeks earlier, he went to get checked out.

“I went to an pressing care to get a blood take a look at, and my platelet rely was dangerously low,” Chen says. “I drove to Anschutz (the CU Anschutz Medical Campus), walked into the ER and handed them the blood take a look at and stated, ‘I want platelets.’”

Quickly after that, Chen — then 25 — was identified with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a kind of blood cancer. He was seen by suppliers from the University of Colorado Cancer Centertogether with And PollyeaMD, MS, and Clay SmithMD, who began Chen on a course of chemotherapy to eradicate the most cancers.

Tristan Chen

“It was fairly scary,” says Chen, who moved to Denver from Boston in 2014 to pursue a level in laptop science from the College of Denver. “It is fairly a critical analysis. With information like that, it takes a short while to settle in.”

Stem cells to the rescue

After two rounds of chemotherapy, docs informed Chen his most cancers was in remission. Nevertheless, to provide him one of the best likelihood for treatment, he acquired a stem cell transplant.

“For a youthful affected person like Tristan, the usual algorithm of therapy is that you just obtain intensive chemotherapy to attempt to deliver the illness beneath management initially,” says CU Most cancers Middle member Jonathan GutmanMD, who oversaw Chen’s transplant. “The following step is both further chemotherapy or a stem cell transplant. A stem cell transplant is the unique type of immunotherapy. The concept is that small immunologic variations between the affected person’s cells and the donor’s cells permit the donor cells to destroy the residual dangerous leukemia cells. A transplant provides the next likelihood of treatment, nevertheless it comes at a higher threat of problems.”

Medical doctors have a look at a lot of elements when deciding whether or not or to not do a stem cell transplant, together with particular abnormalities which are current within the leukemia. In Chen’s case, they discovered abnormalities related to a unfavorable prognosis. That, coupled with the truth that he hadn’t had an incredible response to his first course of chemotherapy, led docs to advocate the transplant in Chen’s case. The stem cell transplant was carried out through a transfusion that blended blood from Chen’s brother with donated wire blood, which is wealthy in blood-forming stem cells and doesn’t must be as carefully donor-matched as an grownup donor.

“Tristan didn’t have a wonderfully matched sibling and didn’t have any matched choices within the grownup donor registry,” Gutman says. “An alternative choice for potential donors that has emerged up to now 20 years or so is umbilical wire blood, which is banked publicly world wide and may doubtlessly be used as a donor supply for transplant. It doesn’t should be as carefully matched as grownup donors due to the immunologic nature of those naive wire blood cells.”

Chen acquired what’s referred to as a haploidentical wire blood (or “haplo wire”) stem cell transplant, as his brother was a half-match for his particular tissue kind. Half of the stem cells got here from Chen’s brother and half got here from donated wire blood. The method helps the wire blood start to develop extra rapidly after the transplant. It was successful in Chen’s case, although it wasn’t straightforward on his physique.

“They zapped me with chemo once more for every week earlier than the transplant and gave me radiation to wipe my immune system,” Chen says. “It’s not like a kidney — you’ll be able to’t simply take it out. You need to kill it, principally. They gave me the transplant, after which I used to be within the hospital for one more month as a result of you must wait on your blood cells to get well.”

Not like the chemotherapy, to which Chen had a reasonably gentle response, the transplant wiped him out, he says.

“The primary few rounds of chemo had been tremendous,” he says. “I used to be nonetheless pretty energetic and strolling round and principally felt sort of nauseous. The transplant was considerably more durable. I misplaced numerous weight, and my sister needed to stand subsequent to me whereas we walked across the block. I used to be sleeping no less than 12 hours a day.”

Again to the rocks

When Chen first left the hospital, he was so weak he wasn’t allowed to drive. His mother and father needed to drive him to a climbing health club, the place he slowly regained his power.

“New 12 months’s Day of 2023 is once I began to really feel regular once more,” he says. “It’s been a fairly regular restoration since then.”

Early 2023 can be when Chen started bouldering once more in earnest, in February making his strategy to Hueco Tanks State Park in Texas to re-conquer a basic bouldering route referred to as Esperanza. It’s the one he stored fascinated by whereas he was mendacity in his hospital mattress, figuring out one of the best route in his thoughts.

“It was one thing to try for,” he says. “Climbing has been such an enormous a part of my life for many years, and it was a strategy to problem myself. One of many issues that I missed most was simply with the ability to climb with my associates — to hang around and climb collectively and have enjoyable. I skilled the lack of that, so getting it again, it feels even higher now.”

Tristan Chen is thought internationally for his mastery of bouldering.

Gutman is aware of how daunting it’s for any affected person to be identified with AML and face the prospect of a stem cell transplant — it’s “like a lightning bolt of their life that comes alongside and totally blows issues up,” he says. Generally much more so for sufferers who’re in any other case younger and wholesome. That’s why Gutman — an novice rock climber himself — is gratified to see Chen again doing the game he loves.

“As any individual who has performed a tiny little bit of climbing, I do know sufficient to have the ability to respect no less than a bit of of what he does, and it’s fairly outstanding and spectacular,” Gutman says. “It’s at all times great to see individuals, after a transplant, doing issues on the stage that they had been in a position to do them earlier than, if not even higher.”