By VICTOR GRETO
The News Journal

07/09/2006

When Richard Deede asked Jill Sabsevitz to marry him last year, he did it the old-fashioned way -- on one knee, and at the place where he first saw her, a corner at Main and Academy streets on the University of Delaware campus.

It was April, drizzling, and the thick clouds made the afternoon dark, but when he slipped the carefully chosen 1-carat round solitaire on her left hand, it fit perfectly.

Everything seemed right, despite the weather, despite the small argument they had about whether it was even the right corner.

He dropped to his knee, she said yes and couldn't take her eyes off the ring.

But eight months later, the wedding was on hold. Their dreams of children, a dog, a home between their parents' houses in New Jersey and Wilmington, and careers slammed up against reality: Jill was diagnosed with cancer.

She's spent most of the last six months in a hospital and is receiving her fourth chemotherapy treatment. Her cancer has proven resistant.

Now, instead of moving ahead with wedding plans, the families are searching for a bone marrow donor who matches Jill's Eastern-European Jewish heritage.

Richard's mother, Ann Phillips, is putting together a July 18 bone marrow drive for her "soon-to-be-daughter-in-law" as the two families desperately try to find a genetic match so Jill can live.

"I not only want to save Jill," Ann says, "but also Richard's dream."

Life's unexpected turns

A week before the April drizzle, Jill had wanted to ask Richard to marry her. By then, Richard was a computer programmer; Jill had just begun a career in therapy, on the brink of earning a Ph.D in psychology.

She asked him what he thought about women proposing to men.

"But I had been planning it for months," Richard says.

The ring had to be perfect, and he had to get her to that corner of the campus where they had first met.

He first saw her at that corner walking with his roommate. Both of them were part of a group of friends that went out now and then.

Richard finally asked her out, and they dated for four years during college. They even tried to continue the relationship long distance while she attended graduate school in Albany, N.Y.

"I would drive up at least once a month for a weekend, and sometimes she'd come down here," Richard says. "But it put a strain on us after some time."

They broke up.

Less than one year later, Jill e-mailed Richard.

"She asked if she could see me again to say hi," Richard remembers. "I asked why, and she said she was no longer seeing anyone, but wanted to just see me."

"I discovered I didn't like being without him," Jill says.

After some hesitation, Richard discovered that, too, but only after she came to visit him at the home he'd recently bought in Trolley Square.

After Richard asked Jill to marry him, the couple drove to Richard's parents' home in Brandywine Hundred, where his stepfather had put up a sign on the door: "It's about friggin' time."

"She called her mom, and my parents had a toast for us," Richard says.

They spent the night together at Richard's home. Jill moved in with Richard in July.

Jill's mother, Debbie, who lives with husband Arthur in Monroe Township in central New Jersey, began planning for an Oct. 29, 2006, wedding for her only daughter. She already had booked the band, the location and the rabbi.

Dental work reveals hidden cancer

But in November, Jill had her wisdom teeth pulled. While recovering, she experienced night fevers, and her body ached constantly.

Her family doctor told Jill it probably was some virus, but another doctor ordered blood work and quickly called the couple into her office.

"She told me it looked like cancer," Jill says.

Jill checked in to Christiana Hospital Dec. 22 and was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a quickly progressing disease in which too many immature white blood cells overwhelm the blood and bone marrow, crowding out normal blood and marrow cells, destroying the immune system.

About 4,000 people were diagnosed with this form of leukemia in 2004, according to the American Cancer Society. About 1,450 died from it that same year.

The next day, Jill was airlifted by helicopter to Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore because no ambulances were immediately available, and there was a traffic jam on I-95. She has lived at the center for the past six months.

At Johns Hopkins, doctors told Jill that her bone marrow had been completely replaced by the leukemia, cells that neither mature nor die.

"We were able to get rid of some of it, but we couldn't get rid of it all," says Dr. Judith Karp, who has supervised Jill's treatments at Johns Hopkins.

For people Jill's age, there's an 85 percent chance of complete remission. But despite three treatments, that hasn't happened.

Jill is now undergoing her fourth treatment, an experimental one.

Richard and Jill also are looking into a more radical experimental method at the University of Minnesota, which uses umbilical cord blood stem cells instead of bone marrow stem cells from an adult donor.

Once the leukemia is in remission, the family wants Jill to have a bone marrow transplant, which will cost up to $400,000.

Jill still must find a donor.

Out of a set of worldwide databases of more than 10 million potential donors, none have been a perfect match for Jill.

Her two older brothers, Barry and David, are perfect matches for each other, but only half-matches for their sister.

And because the treatments have not reduced the leukemia to a low enough point, a half-match is not good enough.

"The chances of a transplant working are significantly greater when the leukemia itself is in some type of remission," Karp says. "Sometimes, you can find a match within your family."

"I should have had a couple of more kids," Debbie says.

Symbols of love come in all sizes

Jill's engagement ring no longer fits her finger.

She has lost nearly 15 pounds since December and weighs about 94 pounds.

Richard has since bought her a smaller ring with a blue topaz stone. She keeps her engagement ring at her parents' home and will put it back on when she gets better.

Jill's long, coal-black hair has fallen out three times after three monthlong chemotherapy treatments. When it grows back, its thick strands look like tines curling around her small skull.

Each time her hair grows back, it seems softer. Her family likes to run their fingers through it. Even Richard can't help himself.

"It's so soft," he says.

She jokes about feeling like a pet.

"I prefer a treat after it's touched," Jill says.

Before Jill's first treatment, her mother, Debbie, cut Jill's hair short in anticipation of her losing it.

"I keep it in my room," Debbie says. "It smells like her, that powder smell. Is that weird?"

"It's creepy," Jill says.

But it's not really creepy when you know how much of Jill's stuff Debbie has saved, including baby shoes, clothes, baby books and photo albums containing the pictures of every conceivable "turning point" of her only daughter's life.

"After the two boys, I wanted a girl," Debbie says. "Arthur said after this one, that was it. So, when I woke up [after giving birth], and they told me she was a girl, I was jumping off the bed with excitement."

Medical expenses mount quickly

For a few precious days between the weeks of treatment in Baltimore, Jill comes to her parents' home in New Jersey.

Richard stays with Jill's family when Jill is there, as do her two brothers when they can get away from work. David is a neuropsychologist who lives in Milwaukee; Barry is a computer programmer who lives in Fort Collins, Colo.

At the house, the family and Richard watch movies together, play Texas hold'em, or putt-putt golf if Jill feels up to going out. If she does go out, she wears a surgical mask over her face to prevent breathing in germs.

"We're holding things together now," Karp says. "But the leukemic cells are very smart and sociopathic. Her leukemia cells can infiltrate other cells."

"It never occurred to us that there wouldn't be a match for Jill," Debbie says. "When we found out our sons weren't a perfect match, we got scared."

It's like looking into a long tunnel, Jill's father Arthur says.

"You don't know if there's a light at the end."

While Jill goes through her treatments, her parents spend weekdays with her, and Richard weekends.

Much of the rest of their time is devoted to fundraisers to help pay Jill's bills, and drives to help find a bone marrow transplant donor.

For each person who submits to a cheek-swab test for the bone marrow drive, it costs the couple $100. Altogether, the family and their friends have raised about $20,000 and registered hundreds of people.

There are other expenses.

The helicopter ride that took Jill to Johns Hopkins cost $10,000. They're battling the insurance company to pay for it.

Richard's insurance will pay up to $250,000 of the $400,000 bone-marrow transplant.

Jill's New Jersey neighbors headed a bone marrow drive for her in June. Richard held a poker fundraiser at the end of February. In June, his company, Avenue A/Razorfish, an Internet marketing company in Philadelphia, rented a restaurant and bar and held a quiz game to raise money.

Richard's family is helping sponsor a bone marrow drive July 18 at the Jewish Community Center in Talleyville.

Dreams survive an uncertain future

When Jill said yes to Richard near the intersection of Academy and Main in Newark, the couple thought they had their future figured out.

Now nothing seems certain, including when they will marry.

Their planned honeymoon to Australia is off, but the marriage is something else again.

"I want to wait until remission," Jill says, "but Richard is adamant about getting married soon."

But pressed, Richard also is unsure.

"We've thought about doing something small, or something bigger when she's cured, or putting it off totally," he says. "We haven't decided."

But one certainty that everyone agrees upon is that, bone marrow aside, Jill and Richard are a perfect match, Debbie says.

"I thought she would become my daughter after they got married," Ann Phillips, Richard's mother. "She already is."

Richard says he will sell his home and live in a cardboard box to make the bone marrow transplant a reality.

But an even harsher reality is that Richard can do nothing physically to help Jill.

Staring at Jill's hand one afternoon on the couch of Jill's parents, Richard touches the ring finger of her left hand.

"When she had the diamond, when I first gave it to her," he says, "she couldn't take her eyes off it."

Even now, as he stares at her hand and the substitute topaz stone on her finger, he says, "She doesn't value anything more today than that ring."

He doesn't realize that, while he's looking at her hand, Jill just can't take her eyes off of him.

Contact Victor Greto at 324-2832 or vgreto@delawareonline.com.