leukemia – Baltimore Magazine

Old Westminster Winery’s Drew Baker Searches for a Cure

Lauren Cohen — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 15:56:20 +0000

—Photography by Justin Tsucalas

“My nightmare journey began April 10, 2022,” says Drew Baker of Old Westminster Winery in Carroll County.

A leukemia diagnosis meant that his plans and dreams—for his business and for his family—had to be suspended and redirected toward fighting his disease. Shortly before that, he and his co-owners—his two sisters—were working to transform this rural stretch of land into more than just a vineyard. It was slated to take a more holistic approach to farming, which would include pastured-raised cattle and hogs, an apiary, and, of course, grapes. Today, everything is on hold but the vines.

“I have only so much energy,” says Baker before a vista of the Appalachian Mountains. “We sent the hogs to slaughter, the bees are here, but they’re on their own for now.”

Still, the 36-year-old father of three has an infectiously positive energy that continues to flow, and he remains excited for Old Westminster, which has become one of the region’s preeminent wineries since opening its doors in 2013. One more recent land acquisition dubbed “Burnt Hill” is devoted in part to native American grapes, part of an ongoing experiment to push the limits of what is possible in Maryland winemaking.

“Not only that, but we may become the first Certified Organic vineyard in Maryland history,” he says. “Regent, man—it’s an amazing grape. It’s a Chambourcin hybrid, which we know succeeds in Maryland, but it also has DNA from Müller-Thurgau and Sylvaner, grapes more resistant to disease. It could be a gamechanger here!”

Ironically, it’s his own disease he’s grappling with instead. Hopes that his sister, Ashli, was a high-quality donor for his bone marrow transplant at Johns Hopkins were dashed this year when his cancer returned and only a brand-new drug is keeping it at bay.

He needs a new donor, which if luck is on his side, he’ll find through Be The Match, an organization devoted to registering donors and matching them to patients. And he has taken to social media this year to raise awareness and encourage people to register—many followers have signed up. Additionally, on Thursday, September 7—to coincide with Blood Cancer Awareness Month—Old Westminster is teaming up with chef Bryan Voltaggio to host a multi-course wine dinner with all proceeds benefiting Be The Match.

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Throughout our conversation, Baker radiates wisdom and introspection. Facing death has distilled what is important in life with brutal clarity, compelling him to lean into his mental and spiritual health. And even if his kids are too young to understand, his wife, Casey, does.

“She’s my rock—my absolute rock,” he says, standing in front of one of his meadows, which teems with life. “Elements of this journey, I wouldn’t wish away. I have an opportunity to intentionally invest in my relationships—I am grateful for that, win or lose.”

We’re all rooting for a win.

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Miracle Worker

Aaron Hope — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 08:30:00 +0000

A childhood illness forever shapes the life of a Sinai Hospital doctor.

By Jane Marion
Photography by Mike Morgan

Home & Living

Miracle Worker

A childhood illness forever shapes the life of a Sinai Hospital doctor.

By Jane Marion.
Photography by Mike Morgan.

Dr. Jonathan Ringo keeps the kind of schedule that would leave men half his age utterly exhausted. After morning prayer at the Jewish seminary on the Pikesville campus on which he lives, Ringo, 49, makes the short commute to Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, where he serves as president and chief operating officer. At work, he deals with everything from construction issues to contract negotiations to overseeing a staff of 4,800 employees. As a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist, once a month or so, he delivers a baby. He takes time to pray in the middle of the day and, in the evening, often eats dinner with a board member or another physician to talk shop. He answers emails and takes phone calls while walking on his new treadmill desk at work (at the pace of two to three miles an hour), devotes as much time as he can to his brood of six, helps with their homework, swims a half mile three times a week, and manages to study the Talmud before going to bed past midnight.

Relying on a steady stream of caffeine and strict self-discipline, Ringo says that sleep is about the only thing he doesn’t fit into his schedule. By his count, he takes roughly 15,000 steps a day. “You don’t want to miss an opportunity,” is how he sums up his credo.

It wouldn’t take an attending psychiatrist at Sinai to read between the lines of Ringo’s life. Forty-three years ago, the good doctor almost died—and the fact that he didn’t provided the leitmotif to his life.

Sitting in his homey office on the first floor of the 152-year-old hospital—one of the first to treat and train Jewish people—Ringo, an Orthodox Jew, recounts how he came here by way of his native South Africa, first arriving in the U.S. in 1975 as a 6-year-old patient at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“I had a typical childhood,” Ringo says in his South African accent. “But one day I was playing field hockey and my friend hit me in the nose with a hockey stick. Obviously, my nose was bleeding—and it had stopped bleeding—but that night it started bleeding again. My parents couldn’t get it to stop. It bled. And bled. And bled.”

After many hours, Ringo’s mother was able to control the bleeding, but the next day, she remained troubled by the experience, her mother’s intuition kicking in. “She just had this premonition,” Ringo recalls. A general practitioner agreed to run a blood test to placate the anxious mom. And then the worst happened. “We lived in the small town of Germiston outside of Johannesburg,” says Ringo, “and the doctor called my father and said, ‘Look, you need to come home for lunch.’ Then he sat down at our family’s table and said, ‘We made the diagnosis of leukemia.’ He later told my parents it was one of the worst days of his career.”

Stunned by the news, Ringo’s parents drove him to the children’s hospital in Johannesburg for further evaluation and a bone aspiration to determine the exact type of blood cancer. With lab results complete, the news went from bad to worse: It was a fairly rare type of blood cancer known as acute myelogenous leukemia, AML in medical shorthand, a cancer of the myeloid line of blood cells characterized by the rapid growth of abnormal cells that build up in the bone marrow and blood and interfere with normal blood cells. At the time, the cure rate was no better than 10 percent.

“My parents were told, ‘There’s nothing we can do—just take him home and keep him comfortable,’” Ringo recalls.

Undaunted, his mother looked at the doctor and said, ‘You’re the first person I’m going to invite to his bar mitzvah.’”

With lab results complete, the news went from bad to worse. . . . At the time, the cure rate was no better than 10 percent.

While many people thought that the Ringos were making a mistake by intervening, they contacted the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, where a friend’s brother was a physician. That physician encouraged them to make the nearly 8,000-mile journey. “There were some people who were critical of my parents for taking me away,” says Ringo. “They said, ‘He’s going to die in a strange country—you’re not going to have any support there. You’re just torturing him.’”

Despite the grim prognosis, the Ringos refused to sit by and watch their son die. “By the time we came to America, I was so much weaker,” says Ringo. “My father had to literally carry me just because of the disease progression within a week.”

A young medical fellow by the name of Howard Weinstein was at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at the time, and Ringo became one of his patients. “I spent lots and lots of time with the family back then,” says Weinstein, who is now chief of pediatric hematology-oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, “and I remember when his parents first came to Boston from Johannesburg, they were pretty panicked. Jonathan was amazingly easygoing. He was always an upbeat kind of a kid, a real trickster. His dad would go to the joke shop that was nearby, and he and his dad would play pranks on the doctors and nurses.”

Treatment began right away, with high doses of powerful chemotherapy cocktails, including different combinations of drugs such as Adriamycin, mercaptopurine, and cytosine arabinoside. “It was the perfect storm of treatment for Jonathan,” recalls Weinstein. “Prior to his arrival, we were not treating patients with AML so aggressively. At the point we treated him, there was still a very active debate in the world of childhood and adult cancer care about how aggressive to be for folks with AML—the thinking was not to treat it aggressively because it wouldn’t make a difference.”

At times, the side effects made Ringo as sick as the disease itself. He lost his hair—and his appetite. He developed mouth ulcers. He required so many infusions that doctors used the veins in his legs for procedures. “My mother was there by my side the whole time,” he says, “and she was like, ‘We’re going to get through the next five minutes, the next hour, the next day.’” Within three to four months, he was in remission.

Dr. Jonathan Ringo often works while walking on his treadmill to get the most out of every day.

Over the course of two-and-a-half years, Ringo and his family traveled between South Africa and Boston. “Because no one had made it as far as I had in the protocol, they weren’t sure when to stop treatment,” says Ringo. “Dr. Weinstein said that one of the hardest decisions he ever had to make was to discontinue treatment—no one knew what would happen. I had a blood test once a month at first, then every three months, and then every six months. The first couple of years, we came back for every bone-marrow aspiration.”

Weinstein became so bonded with the boy that he flew to South Africa on several occasions to work in concert with doctors on his follow-up care, and, yes, to attend Ringo’s bar mitzvah. (On the day of his bar mitzvah, there was, in fact, a headline in the Germiston paper that said, “Joy of a Teenage Boy Who Should Be Dead,” says Ringo, smiling at the memory, “and, ironically, the doctor from Johannesburg had died several years before my bar mitzvah.”)

Not only did Ringo survive, and eventually thrive, but his treatment had far-reaching implications. “We learned an awful lot from the therapy that he received and used it as a building block for future therapy,” says Weinstein. Ringo’s therapy led to the development of a clinical trial of a protocol that started the year after he finished, increasing the survival rate from 10 percent to 50 at the time, explains Weinstein. “It is still a difficult leukemia to treat, but we made headway—and now the survival rate is 50 to 70 percent.”

Even decades later, Ringo can cite chapter and verse the names of the drugs he was infused with, the names of the doctors who treated him, the months and years that he went into remission, and the practical jokes that he played with his family to add some levity to his life.

“I’d handcuff nurses to the IV pole,” he says, laughing. “And one of the side effects of the drugs was diabetes, so they’d dip a stick in my urine every morning. One day I took a packet of sugar from breakfast and dumped into my urine.”

To date, Ringo is one of the longest survivors of myelogenous leukemia in the world. The only real reminder of his illness is a barely noticeable scar above his left eye from a chemo-related bacterial infection that led to an abscess excision. “I also missed out on two years of childhood growth,” he says, “but I’m over six feet.”

As a kid Ringo once entertained thoughts of becoming a fireman or policeman, but his time as a patient made medicine his calling. “The physicians who took care of me were the most brilliant, caring, compassionate people,” he says. “They were great role models for how to take care of people. I can still remember Dr. Bruce Camitta, one of the first doctors I saw when I was examined at Dana-Farber. He sat down with me and drew good and bad cells. He explained to me what was going on—I still remember that 40 years later.”

Before pursuing medicine, Ringo worked in the biotech field for six years. By 1998, he found himself in Baltimore because he had a sister living here and was dating the daughter of a Baltimore rabbi. (He later married her.) By 2004, he was pursuing his dream and enrolled in medical school in St. Kitts and Nevis at the International University of Health Sciences. After medical school, he ended up back in Baltimore, eventually specializing in obstetrics and gynecology because of the broadness of the field. “You have pregnant women with diabetes and, all of a sudden, you’re dealing with two patients, not just one,” says Ringo.

“The physicians who took care of me were the most brilliant, caring, compassionate people. They were great role models.”

on a late July day, wearing a pinstriped suit, a velvet kippah, and a blue tie that matches his eyes, Ringo stops by the pediatric unit to accept a large donation from a family that lost their young son to cancer. Later, he makes the rounds with Director of Patient Experience Katie Starkey. Together, they visit various floors to check in on staff and patients. As he wanders through the infusion center, he stops to chat with a patient and introduces himself. “I’m meeting the big boss today,” she says, smiling. “Is there anything you need? How are you doing?” he asks. A few steps down the hallway, he stops in to see another patient. They speak about her relatives in South Africa, and he congratulates her on her clean PET scan.

“I have to remember, I didn’t choose banking or finance,” he says as he walks away. “I chose medicine. This job requires daily compassion.”

Ringo’s past is never far from his present. “My leukemia was a gift of life,” he says. “It was such a positive thing. It gives you a different appreciation of every day. In our hospital here, above the elevators, there’s a saying from the Talmud that says something to the effect of, ‘If you save one life, you save the whole world.’ I have that here with these photos of my six kids over my shoulder—that’s all a result of that.” And though his days are busy, taking time for thrice-daily prayer allows time for reflection.

“There’s a prayer that you say in the morning that talks about gratitude and the gift of the body and how if one particular vessel was closed or another open, you couldn’t exist,” he says. “It reminds you on a constant basis of the miracle of life.”

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Top Docs 2014: Media Matters

Jess Mayhugh — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Jennifer Aparicio and Maria Dennis in front of The Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

At 5 p.m. on Thursday, March 20, Jennifer Aparicio was told she had leukemia. Between 5 and 6 p.m., she and her husband, sports-talk-radio host and WNST founder “Nasty” Nestor Aparicio, focused on telling their family and some close friends and business associates. Then, in individual Facebook posts announcing the diagnosis, they told everyone.

Nestor published his first, a little after 6 p.m.

“My wife, the most beautiful girl in the world, was diagnosed with leukemia tonight. She’ll be in Johns Hopkins for the next month battling. She’s the strongest person I’ve ever met. Please keep her in your thoughts and spirit. #JennStrong,” he wrote above a picture of his smiling wife taken on the island of Moorea during their recent vacation.

Jenn’s post came a few hours later and was even more specific:

“Tonight I was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia [Ed note: Her diagnosis was later changed to acute bilineal leukemia, or ABL]. I actually feel and look fine, but had some pain under my arm. Bloodwork [sic] done last Friday showed cells are low and the doctors wanted me to check myself into Johns Hopkins ER last night. So, here I now sit for 3-4 weeks. I will begin chemo tomorrow or the next day, I have a great chance for remission and I’m in the best hospital possible. If anyone wants to reach out to me, I’ll be here— feeling optimistic.”

Combined, the two posts were read by thousands and generated 540 comments, 739 likes, and 17 shares. Additionally, each interaction—message, “like”, share, what have you—was noted on the timeline of each respondent, which, in turn, reached the respondent’s friends, and then, potentially, their friends’ friends, and on and on until, if you were a Baltimorean with an Internet connection, you were likely no more than one or two degrees removed from the news.

“Within an hour, it was completely batshit electric,” says Nestor, a Dundalk native who made his name as a sports writer and music critic at The Evening Sun before switching to radio in the early ’90s.

Amazingly, Jenn and Nestor were not the only high-profile Baltimore media personalities to announce such grave news that day. That same morning, Mix 106.5 FM DJ Maria Dennis had called into her own radio show to explain her recent absence.

“We gotta come clean. We gotta let everybody know what’s going on. It’s important,” she said, speaking to her co-hosts Reagan Warfield and Jon Boesche from her hospital bed at The Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, where both she and Jenn were to receive treatment and forge a new friendship.

“I have been just diagnosed with leukemia. It’s a mind-blower,” she admitted, sounding subdued and dazed in the wake of her official diagnosis with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL.

“People were so nice, But it was a lot.”

Within minutes, Mix 106.5 had a page up on its website recapping the conversation with an embedded audio clip and a message from Warfield and Boesche directing well-wishers to the show’s Facebook page. The very next day, Warfield and Boesche posted a photo on Facebook of 40 printed pages worth of texts, Facebook messages, e-mails, and tweets they had received in support of Maria.

And while you would expect people to be interested in disclosures from high-profile figures, it’s not just the famous that command attention. For every Angelina Jolie revealing her preventative double mastectomy in The New York Times, there is a Zachary Lederer, the Ellicott City-raised, University of Maryland College Park men’s basketball team student manager whose unflaggingly positive outlook in the face of terminal brain cancer made him an Internet phenomenon and whose death this March at the age of 20 was marked with obituaries in The Washington Post and USA Today.

This is illness in the age of social media. Whereas disease was once a closely held private matter, a reason to draw the curtains and cancel all engagements, it is now, like so many other life events, a public act, documented in sometimes startlingly intimate detail on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, personal blogs, and even good-old-fashioned media like print, television, and radio. And while the benefits of such an approach are real and manifold, so too are the potential complications.

“With the changing of the times, it’s definitely something we see a lot of,” says Elissa Bantug, a two-time breast cancer survivor and the program manager of breast cancer communication, education, and survivorship at The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. “But there’s a privacy or anonymity part to that that can be a challenge.”

Clockwise from left: Jenn Aparicio with Kitty; picking tomatoes in Dundalk; with Maria Dennis at Hopkins; sending a message to followers; at Ravens training camp in July.

To hear the Aparicios and Dennis tell it though, there was no intricate calculus to be done in weighing the pros and cons. The decision to go public was essentially a foregone conclusion, necessitated by their already public lives. (Although Jenn actually works for Verizon, she is heavily involved in Nestor’s world and travels with him to most professional events.)

For the Aparicios, the timing demanded especially swift and decisive action. Nestor had retired from daily radio in 2004, but he and Jenn had decided the time was right for him to return with a daily show. He announced his comeback the morning Jenn was diagnosed, a declaration that was sure to garner press coverage. “So I said, ‘Look, I’m trying to go back on the radio, I don’t know how we’re going to do this,’” Nestor recalls. “She said, ‘You can tell anyone you want because I’m not going to die.’”

Jenn, admittedly the steadier of the two throughout the ordeal, figured she had bigger concerns than media attention. If being public simplified things, then so be it.

“I was on board from the get-go. It didn’t make sense to try and hide it, you know?” she says with a shrug.

Dennis, who has been on the air at Mix 106.5 since 1997, felt similarly. “I was always the person to just lay it all out. I’ve always done that. So I just laid it all out,” she says.

For Dennis, this meant calling into the station periodically for status updates that touched on everything from hair loss to her curiosity about the bone marrow donor who provided the new, healthy tissue for her June 26 transplant. (HRSA mandates that bone marrow donations be kept anonymous for a period of time, though some contact may be permitted.) It also meant occasional missives posted by her or her sister-in-law on CaringBridge.org, a micro-blogging site with approximately 500,000 daily users that allows those experiencing illness to communicate en masse with loved ones. Dennis says the page, which has received over 4,000 views, relieved her of the burden of having to retell her story ad nauseam.

“It didn’t make sense to try and hidE it, you know?”

“When people ask you how you’re doing, you feel sick,” she says, “So it’s a great way to have people get information without having to either text or e-mail. I mean, how many times can I tell the same thing?”

At the same time, Dennis says she has been careful not to over-share for her own sake, as well as the sake of her audience.

“If you post that you’re doing well and something happens that day, you don’t want to disappoint, so you’ve got to kind of be careful,” she says, noting that after her successful transplant, she has battled graft-versus-host disease, a condition in which the newly transplanted cells war with the patient’s native cells.

And perhaps unsurprisingly for someone whose job it is to engage listeners, Dennis also worries about alienating
her audience.

“I don’t want to be one of those people that comes on every other day and people get sick of it, you know what I mean? Because that happens. ‘Okay, she’s got cancer, whatever.’”

Though Dennis isn’t referencing any specific criticism, it is not an irrational fear. People can and do have unsympathetic reactions to any number of tragic phenomena. And there does seem to be something about cancer that inspires particularly strong opinions and harsh judgments. Witness Melissa Etheridge calling Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a preventative double mastectomy “fearful.” Or Google The New York Times’ January op-ed about Lisa Bonchek Adams, a Connecticut woman who tweets and blogs regularly about her stage IV metastatic breast cancer. The op-ed, written by former Times executive editor Bill Keller, criticized Adams’s treatment choices and seemed to deride her social-media presence as undignified. Its condescending tone spurred a torrent of responses both for and against the piece. The only thing the controversy settled was that nobody can expect cancer to inoculate them from criticism. In fact, the shield of anonymity provided by the Internet often breeds intensely virulent strains of it.

“You get people who get really aggressive about how they feel in any type of online program,” acknowledges Bantug. “I know it sounds crazy, but you actually see some—for lack of a better term—cyberbullying.”

That hasn’t been Jenn Aparicio’s experience, though. Through her own CaringBridge page, her Facebook profile, and Nestor’s frequent, lengthy updates via WNST’s website and his own Facebook and Twitter accounts, she has been embraced in a cyberhug.

“The pros [are] all the support we’ve gotten,” she says, “not just from family and friends, but people who are fans of Nestor’s, who have now become fans of mine. It has been nice to have that support.” Asked if she thinks she would have received the same amount of support without going public, she replies matter-of-factly: “I don’t think so. I mean, people would have found out, but it’s not like people would have reached out to me directly, whereas, now, I have a following, too.”

And that following has been there with her every step of the way. Indeed, in between the many pictures of her beloved calico rescue cat, Kitty, and the requisite funny viral videos, a look back through her Facebook timeline provides a detailed, well-rounded account of her experience. In March, she has a full head of long dirty-blonde hair. She looks healthy and tan from her recent vacation, and the statuses are often lighthearted and funny such as one from March 27 in which she chides, “I got to stop eating in bed, darned crumbs are everywhere! #JennStrong #BmorePositive”

By April 29, her hair is gone and she is gaunt, but the couple celebrates her release from the hospital after 41 days with a picture of Jenn reuniting with Kitty. On May 30, the day before her birthday, she receives word that a bone marrow donor match has been found. And then, on June 26—the same day as Maria Dennis—she celebrates her “re-birthday” by posting a picture of her in-progress bone marrow transplant, the caption noting that she listened to Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” during the procedure.

Accompanying each of those statuses—and the many in between—are thousands of messages of support from family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and total strangers. Some even ask how they can send gifts or offer to help in other ways, ranging from fundraising to shaving their heads in solidarity.

Only a few times did the couple feel like their boundaries had been crossed.

“People were so nice, but it was a lot,” remembers Nestor. “People started showing up in the hospital unannounced.”

Jenn is able to laugh it off now but was rattled at the time. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on?!’ Because at that time it was still flu season, so anyone who came in my room had to wear a mask. It didn’t help that [Nestor] slipped [on the radio] saying, ‘Yeah, she’s on the fifth floor at Hopkins!’ We won’t be doing that part again,” she declares.

Maria Dennis experienced similar levels of generosity and awkwardness when her sister set up a fundraising page to help Dennis pay her hefty medical bills.

“She didn’t tell me. I was so pissed. I was like, ‘What are you doing? You can’t do that!’” Dennis recalls.

Though she was initially angry, she now admits that the almost $3,000 the page raised was incredibly helpful.

“It really, really helped,” allows Dennis, who lives in Pikesville with her husband, Eddie, and their two sons, Noah, 10, and Ben, 8. “I wasn’t even thinking about that, and I was uncomfortable asking for it.”

Overall, though, both the Aparicios and Dennis feel going public was the right decision for them, especially when they were able to use the spotlight to raise awareness for blood cancer charities like There Goes My Hero, which was founded by Bel Air’s Erik Sauer in the wake of his own battle with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). The Aparicios have organized several bone marrow drives for the nonprofit, which have attracted the support of several Ravens, including Joe Flacco and Dennis Pitta. Nestor also has provided a weekly platform for Sauer on his show.

“We do it every week at this point, but the fact that we are talking about it, we get tons of exposure. It’s hugely important,” Sauer says.

More than seven months removed from their diagnoses, both Jenn Aparicio and Maria Dennis are officially in remission. Their hair and appetites are returning and they are starting to think about going back to work. “I just want to not push it,” Dennis says. “I get tired real easy. I’ve got to make sure I’m clear of the graft-versus-host, and I also have one more chemotherapy treatment that I have to go through before I go back.”

Ever the even-tempered optimist, Jenn says she appreciates that her illness further strengthened her relationship with her husband and helped her make new friends.

“There’s always good that comes out of bad,” she says. “You may not see it in the beginning, but everything has a silver lining.”

Even cancer?

“It’s one hell of a way to make new friends, but it never hurts to have too many friends,”—Facebook or otherwise.

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