I was drawn to bone marrow transplantation largely by serendipity. I’ve always been very interested in immunology. I was a second-year fellow working in a lab when Stanford started its transplant program. The new chief of the transplant program was looking for somebody to help him. At the time, I was pretty happy in the lab, so I wasn’t interested in the job. Then my wife and I had our first child, and he got very ill and had to have major surgery when he was seven weeks old. He’s fine now, but he was really sick for a month or two, and I decided this job in the transplant program was a good opportunity for advancement. So I took that job in the transplant program, and it has worked out really well.

I was doing well at Stanford performing bone marrow transplantations. In 1995, I got a letter from Duke asking me to interview for a job here. Duke was the first job interview that I’ve ever done! They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, so in 1996 I came to Duke to run the Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) Program, which is now part of our Division of Cellular Therapy.

In the BMT Program, we primarily see adult patients with leukemias, lymphomas, and myelomas, as well as some patients with breast and renal cancers. Most are from the Southeast, but we also have people come to Duke from around the country and the world. We perform two types of transplants: “autologous,” which is using your own bone marrow, and “allogeneic,” which is using someone else’s. The choices depend on the disease and the type of response. Most patients end up getting very high doses of chemotherapy with or without radiation, and then we put the stem cells back in. It’s a pretty intensive treatment, and patients get pretty wiped out before the cells come back. In the past three or four years, we’ve been able to find ways to use lower doses and better drugs that have decreased some of the side effects.

I work with a terrific group of people on the BMT team, from fellow physicians, to the nursing staff, to the support staff. As a program director you can do so much, but it really is the people working day to day who make the biggest difference. Our team works together very well.

I have typical things I do every day, but I don’t really have a typical day, which is part of the fun. I usually get up at quarter to six and I go running, and I’m usually at work by eight. On Mondays, I see new patients in the morning and return patients in the afternoon. If I’m attending on the wards, then at eight o’clock I go to do rounds at Duke Hospital. I’m back at the BMT Outpatient Clinic by 10 or 11a.m., and then do rounds here. I go back to the hospital about four o’clock to do rounds and see patients again. In between, I usually have meetings, do administrative work, and work on my research, which is mainly focused on graft-versushost disease, a condition that occurs when we put donor cells into a patient.

I usually get home about seven every day. Two of my kids swim year-round, so they don’t get home until about eight-thirty, and then we all sit down for dinner. My evenings are generally free, and I enjoy reading novels and historical works. I’ve always been interested in financing health care issues, so I earned an MBA through Fuqua’s Weekend Executive MBA program in 2000. It doesn’t factor a whole lot into what I’m doing now, but it was helpful to learn the language of business. The most challenging part of my job is maintaining balance: balancing work, family, and patients in terms of time as well as emotional energy.

For a long time when I was younger, I thought I was going to be a marine biologist. Then during my freshman year, I had a marine biology professor who had discovered some Sanskrit tablets while diving, and he spent the whole course talking about Sanskrit! As a result, I quickly let marine biology fall by the wayside, and I haven’t regretted it since!

Like most nurses, Martha Lassiter chose her profession because she wanted to help people. But she never thought she’d end up working with cancer patients.

Lassiter came to Duke in 1983 straight out of nursing school. After two years working in neurology and dermatology, she learned that Duke was starting a Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) Program.

“I was looking for a change and thought transplant might be interesting. The challenges of working with a more acute population of patients really appealed to me. I was in the first group of nurses hired in the BMT Program in 1985 – Istarted and I just loved it.”

Working in partnership with Dr. Nelson Chao and Dr. Cristina Gasparetto, today she serves as the main contact for transplant patients, referring physicians, families, and bone marrow donors, guiding everyone through the transplant process.

“The nurse clinicians provide continuity for patients and families,” explains Lassiter, who is one of four nurse clinicians in the BMT Program. “Patients see us at every visit up to the transplant, and we act as a liaison during the transplant phase. It’s our job to make sure that all of the appropriate people know what’s going on with the patient, the donor, and the families, from referring physicians to the lab to other services here at Duke.

“The whole transplant team – the physicians, the nurses, the nurse practitioners, social workers, phlebotomists – everybody really works together to provide patients with the best care that we can.”

For Lassiter, one of the rewards of her job is seeing patients who have returned to their normal lives. The program hosts an annual reunion for adult patients who are out from transplant more than a year, a wonderful setting for the staff to reconnect with patients and celebrate how well they’ve done.

One of the patients that Lassiter enjoys celebrating with is Trent Satterwhite, who has worked with Lassiter and Dr. Chao since 1998. “Martha has been my little rock,” says Satterwhite. “I have opened up some things with her that I haven’t opened up to my parents. She knows me better than a book.”

Lassiter says that “people always ask, ‘Isn’t it depressing to work with cancer patients?’ It is difficult when patients don’t do as well as you’d hoped. But we get so much more back from the patients than I could possibly give to them. We’re uninvited guests in their lives, and it’s a privilege to take care of these patients and to be such a big part of their lives.”