Texas football player seeking medical treatment in Naples
By LIZ FREEMAN (Contact)
8:12 p.m., Sunday, April 27, 2008
A few weeks ago, 20-year-old Andre Lampkin was home in Bedford, Texas, on spring break from his freshman year in junior college on a football scholarship.
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Bacterial meningitis has led the young man on an unimaginable whirlwind tour of hospitals, airplane trips and emergency transport vehicles from Dallas to Naples to the Dominican Republic and back to Naples.
'He has incredible spirit,' said Dr. Zannos Grekos, a Naples cardiologist who has treated Lampkin with adult stem cell therapy that had been found to stimulate tissue growth. 'Any one of us would have given up a long time ago.'
Lampkin's aunt learned of the therapy, still experimental in the United States, on the Internet and how Grekos is involved in stem cell research for treating peripheral artery disease at Metropolitan Hospital of Santiago in the Dominican Republic. The therapy involves using a patient's own stem cells and not embryonic stem cells.
The next two weeks will be telling, whether the therapy is working to stimulate new blood vessels in Lampkin's hands and legs to restore blood flow, Grekos said.
'I will be pleased with stabilizing the progression of what is going on,' Grekos said. 'And hopefully in a few weeks to see reversal of the bad areas. It's really an attempt to minimize amputation this young man is facing.'
Lampkin, exhausted and medicated, doesn't want the lights on in his hospital room, doesn't want to watch television or have people see what is happening, his mother said.
Back home, families in Bedford are praying that the stem cell therapy will work, said Sherri Jones, whose son played football with Lampkin at L.D. Bell High School in the community between Dallas and Fort Worth.
'It's just unbelievable, a young man once so athletic and so much promise,' she said. 'He's a nice kid and someone you wanted to take care of. He was an outstanding player. It's just so sad.'
The football booster club has established a bank account to help with the family's expenses, Jones said.
Lampkin's journey to Naples began March 12 when he went home for spring break from Cisco Junior College, in Cisco, Texas, a small school of 900 students.
He was spending the night at a friend's house when he began acting strangely, his mother said.
'They said he was acting kind of weird, confused and couldn't breathe,' she said.
The next day, his friends found him unconscious and called an ambulance. At the local hospital, he was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, an infection of the fluids in the spinal cord and the brain that can lead to death.
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