Medicine: The Sickle Threat

When Marclan Walker was born in Griffin, Ga., she weighed 7 Ibs. and appeared perfectly normal, just like her two older sisters. Not until Marclan was five months old did her mother notice anything unusual. Then it was a lack of infant energy. “I had no worry about her falling or wriggling off a bed,” Myrtis Walker says, “because she just stayed exactly where she was put.” But soon her father, the Rev. Lorenda R. Walker, took a pastorate in Columbus. The trip to Ohio in a model A Ford was rough, and Marclan came down with pneumonia. At Columbus’ Children’s Hospital, doctors found something worse: she had sickle-cell anemia. That was early in 1938. It was two years before she went home from the hospital.

Sickle-cell anemia is so-called because, in its victims, many red blood cells change from their normal roughly spherical shape to that of a thin sickle. It is virtually confined to Negroes. The sickling trait is transmitted by a gene—just how is not certain. Best estimates are that 9% of U.S. Negroes (or 1,500,000) carry the gene but rarely need treatment, while perhaps 30,000, who have inherited the gene from both parents, have the full-blown disease.

Finding a Vein. For them there is a continuous struggle for survival after the first few months, during which, like Marclan, most victims show no symptoms. No cure is known. Untreated, the disease is often fatal within ten years; even with the best of care, in severe cases survival beyond 30 is rare. Last week, on the campus of integrated Marshall College in Huntington. W. Va., Marclan Walker was a focus of interest not only because she was going on 22, but because she had told her story in detail in Ebony. It was a story of living from crisis to crisis, and being pulled through each time by blood transfusions.

In cases like hers, the abnormal sickle cells pile up periodically, and many red cells break down, thus lower the hemoglobin—and hence the available oxygen in the blood. The victim feels fatigue, a racing heartbeat, shortness of breath and, as a result of clots which form during the crisis, often severe abdominal pain and aching joints. “Blood transfusions were routine with me,” says Marclan. “Long cuts were made on my ankles so the doctors could insert needles into larger veins than they could find in my arms … At times I would have convulsions, and there would be other times when I would lie for days in a coma . . . My father gave several direct-line transfusions to me before he had to stop because he couldn’t stand to lose more blood. Then he had to go searching for blood donors again.”

For Speech Therapy. When Marclan was three, she was not expected to live. Somehow she clung to life until it was time to go to school, and ever since she has been determined to keep up with her peers. As a high-school senior she won an American Legion essay contest. The prize: a scholarship at Marshall. There (she will be a senior next month) she is taking eleven credit hours, five of them in speech, and plans to become a speech therapist. An average of six times a year she has to go to St. Mary’s Hospital for a few days and four pints of blood. But by various devices, such as always doing her homework in bed, Marclan saves enough energy to play the piano, teach in her father’s Baptist Sunday school, and carry on light campus activities. It has already taken more than 250 pints of blood to keep Marclan Walker up to this pitch of near-normal activity.