BATON ROUGE, La. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- If a disease threatened your life, but there was a 50-percent chance you would die from the treatment, would you try it? Here's one woman who did.

Scleroderma is a disease that causes the skin and organs to harden as if turning the human body into stone. Teri Jeansonne nearly died from it two years ago.

"I was in a lot of pain. I was on very strong painkillers. I stayed in bed all the time. I was miserable," she says. "When my disease started progressing, it was pretty evident that I didn't have that long."

Doctors Stephen Lindsey, M.D., and Jay Brooks, M.D., offered Jeansonne a risky treatment to save her life.

"We clearly talked to Teri about that, that there is a risk of death from the treatment because of the side effects," Dr. Brooks, a hematologist/oncologist at Ochsner Clinic in Baton Rouge, tells Ivanhoe.

He and Dr. Lindsey, an Ochsner rheumatologist, gave Jeansonne a very high dose of Cytoxan, a chemotherapy drug known to help scleroderma in low doses. In a clinical study, she got 10-times the normal dose.

"It kills most of your immune cells except for the resistant cells that are the basic stem cells," Dr. Lindsey says. Within two weeks, those basic stem cells became healthy new blood cells, giving Jeansonne a new immune system and a fresh start.

"It definitely reversed the disease. It hasn't cured the disease," Dr. Lindsey says. "To me, she is a miracle because I do believe she was going to die within six months."

Two years later, her skin has loosened, and the damage to her organs has stopped. She says: "It's awesome. I wanted my life back, and I'm getting it back." Her prognosis is uncertain, but Jeansonne and her doctors are optimistic she'll have a long life full of days like this with her family.

Dr. Lindsey says there are fewer than 20 patients in the United States with scleroderma who have been treated with high-dose chemotherapy. About half of these patients showed significant improvement. The other half died. But he says these patients would have died with no treatment at all. The procedure is extremely risky and should be only considered as a last resort.

If you would like more information, please contact:
Katherine Voss
Senior Public Affairs Specialist
Ochsner Clinic
1221 South Clearview Parkway
Jefferson,LA 7021
(504) 842-2225
kvoss@ochsner.com