9502110263
DETROIT FREE PRESS
951228
Thursday, December 28, 1995
METRO FINAL
1D
Photo Color JON FREILICH/ Special to the Free Press;Photo KIRTHMON DOZIER /Detroit Free Press
Nekita Burnett, whose nickname is "Small World," plays
basketball at Wayne State and hopes to become an architect. Of
her illness she says, "Maybe it's a test of my faith.
Everything happens for a reason."
Carolyn Burnett is proud of her daughter's many achievements,
among them that she hasn't gotten pregnant. "I keep reminding
her of the three B's," Carolyn says. "Boys bring babies."
What Wayne State's Nekita Burnett lacks in height, she makes up
for in speed and determination on the basketball court.
MITCH ALBOM
DREAMS DEFERRED; THIRD IN A SERIES
Copyright (c) 1995, Detroit Free Press
THE WORLD AT HER FINGERTIPS
BUT BONE DISEASE THREATENS BASKETBALL PLAYER'S LIFE
She would not cry. She held back the tears as tightly as she once held her
first basketball, cradling it all day, sleeping with it all night. Never mind
this scary hospital, these sterile walls, these lousy blood tests; never mind
what the doctor was telling her now, that she could die if she didn't have a
bone-marrow transplant. She could die? But she was only 18! Never mind. Nekita
Burnett, a college player the size of an eighth-grader, was used to laughing,
clowning, cracking people up; she never was very good with the sad stuff.
Besides, her mother was beside her, shocked by the doctor's words, and Nekita
knew if she got misty then her mom would just lose it, start sobbing all over,
and Nekita didn't want that. She just wanted out.
"Don't you cry," she told herself, fighting every impulse, "Don't you cry.
. . ."
This is the story of a kid they call "Small World," and if you met her, you
would know why. She is compact and muscular and so full of talent, even her
shadow has skills. She has survived the hardest stones the city has to throw:
poverty, robbery, gangs, guns. One night she lay on the floor of a fast- food
joint as a gunman threatened to shoot all the workers. The next night she was
back, because this was her job, $4.40 an hour, and she couldn't quit, she
needed the money. Besides, that was not her first holdup. A few months
earlier, she had to hide behind the french fry machine as a gunman stole the
cash through a drive-up window.
In her short life, Nekita Burnett has had every urban excuse for giving up:
no father, no money, no status, no security. She has fought off those poisons
with sports, art, good grades and college admission.
And now she could die -- from a long-shot disease that's not supposed to
strike young people, one that really makes you wonder how cruel fate can get.
Someone has to help this kid. It is just that simple. We cannot lose her.
Here is why.
"The building I have in mind is a homeless shelter," she says, sketching
an invisible design on the desk in front of her. We are sitting in the student
lounge of Wayne State, where Nekita takes freshman classes -- in between her
job at Rally's hamburgers, and watching her younger sisters, and practicing
with the Tartars basketball team that she walked on to two months ago.
Basketball is her passion -- she has been playing since she was 9 years old,
mostly with the boys, which explains her take-no-prisoners approach despite
her 5-foot-1 frame -- but her long-range goal is to be an architect.
A builder of cities.
She has wanted this since junior high, when she built a scale model of the
Ambassador Bridge -- out of toothpicks! A few years later, she met an
architect on career day and she visited his office for a school report. There
she saw a scale model of a proposed downtown Detroit. It looked so orderly,
so breathtaking, so possible. "All the little buildings, the trees, the cars,"
she recalls, excitedly. This was what she wanted to do.
Build things.
"In this homeless shelter, I'm envisioning murals on the walls, and a
library, and comfortable beds." She lowers her eyes and smiles. She has one of
those 500-watt smiles, the kind that automatically make you smile back.
"And I was thinking . . . um, the building could be the shape of an 'N.'
Like Nekita? You know, two towers, connected by a diagonal stairway?"
She waves her hand. Laughs again. "I have to work out the details."
Small world, big dreams.
Overcoming obstacles
A few days later, we meet in the place where she lives. And you see why she
dreams. Home is a decaying, upper-level flat off Washburn Street on the
northwest side, with chipping paint, bars on the windows and a tilted porch
that seems one strong breeze from collapsing. Music blares from the tenants on
the lower level, too loud for this winter morning. Upstairs, Nekita sits with
her mother, Carolyn, and younger sister Toi in a tidy front room with a
Christmas tree in the corner. On a table are some family photos, and behind a
couch is Nekita's artwork -- first-rate drawings of friends, teachers, even a
self- portrait.
Still, of all the things that Nekita has done, her mother seems most proud
of the fact that her eldest daughter is 18 and hasn't gotten pregnant.
"I keep reminding her of the three B's," Carolyn says. "Boys bring babies."
Boys bring babies. Carolyn learned that the hard way. She was pregnant
with Nekita when she was 15. One day, walking home, some men started chasing
her. She was wearing a leather coat. They wanted it. Carolyn ran. She ran down
Charlevoix and onto Fairview, breathing hard, looking over her shoulder, they
were still coming, so she darted across the street and wham! She was hit by a
car, went flying and landed in a world of unconsciousness.
"I blacked out," she says. "I don't remember what happened next."
But it still haunts her. To this day, she suffers epileptic seizures that
keep her from steady work. Because of this, she lives from week-to-week on
welfare checks while fighting the paperwork for disability payments.
Carolyn was one of 11 children. Her three girls all have different fathers,
and Nekita's father "doesn't bother with us." But Carolyn loves her daughters
fiercely, so when Nekita began playing basketball with the local guys, her
mother was skeptical.
"Are they looking at you funny?"
"What do you mean funny?" Nekita asked.
"You know, like they want something else?"
"What?"
"Sex."
"Naw, we're just playing basketball."
"Well just make sure that's all you do. Remember. Boys bring babies."
Boys bring babies. Nekita already knew that. Besides, she already had been
taught another version of the three B's: "Books before basketball." This she
was told by teachers in Noble Middle School and later at Mackenzie High,
where she captained the team her senior year. She was a top point guard with a
good long-range shot and a feel for the game born from countless afternoons on
the asphalt court behind school, where in the winter Nekita would borrow a
shovel to clear the snow, then keep on playing.
"With most high school girls, you just want to get the physical stuff down,
let the mental part come in college," says Jan Chapman-Sanders, one of
Nekita's coaches at Mackenzie. "But she knew the game already. She was a ball
handler, a playmaker, and she could pass on a dime."
Unfortunately, as a senior, her team was mostly underclassmen. Nekita
spent more time as a role model than as a star. She did not get recruited by
major universities, and one potential scholarship, at Hampton Institute, fell
apart when the coach there left.
So Nekita stayed home, went to Wayne State, prepared to focus on academics
and get on with becoming the master builder she hoped to be. When she made the
Wayne State team as a walk- on, it was just another plus. After all, unlike
many black inner-city youths, she had passed her 18th birthday with no wounds,
no children, a high school diploma and a possible ticket out. Things looked
good.
And then the blood tests came back.
An unlikely victim
She had known there was a problem a few years earlier. A routine physical
revealed a troubling blood count. She was iron-deficient. For a while she
took pills, and when these didn't help she was tested again. Her bone marrow
wasn't right. The marrow, where the blood cells are formed, is the core of our
human machinery -- just as kids like Nekita are the core of our city's
future.
When one is infected, so is the other.
In Nekita's case, the disease is called Myelodysplastic Syndrome, sometimes
known as "pre-leukemia." It is very similar to the disease that killed radio
star J.P. McCarthy this past summer. Only in McCarthy's case, the candidate
fit the profile.
"This is a disease for 50- or 60-year-olds," says Dr. Steve Abella, who
has seen Nekita at the Karmanos Cancer Institute at Children's and Harper
Hospitals. "It's very rare to find it in someone Nekita's age. . . .
"Do we know what causes it? No. We wish we did. But most patients require
a bone-marrow transplant between five and seven years of diagnosis. And
Nekita, technically, was diagnosed two or three years ago. First she must find
a donor."
And if she finds one?
"There is a 70 percent chance of long-term survival."
And if she doesn't
"It is most likely fatal."
Small world. Big trouble.
The search is on
Back in the student lounge, Nekita sits alone, with her baseball cap and
her non-stop smile. To the outside observer, she is every inch the happy
college student. She says she asked herself "Why me?" about a million times
since that day in the doctor's office. She says she worries now that her
basketball teammates might treat her differently when they know what she has.
"Maybe it's a test of my faith. Everything happens for a reason . . . at
least right now it hasn't affected me. I can still play the same, still make
the same moves, still do everything I always did."
When they told Nekita what a transplant would involve, she replied, in
typical fashion, "I can't put my life on hold for that!" Sadly, she doesn't
have a choice. Without new bone marrow, her system will be unable to ward off
infections. Small colds might not go away. Bruises might not heal. In the end,
if left unchecked, leukemia could move in and take over the body.
And so the search is on for a donor. Nekita's name is in a computer, which
reaches potential donors all over the world. To succeed, their white cells
must match. In Nekita's favor is her age, her good health and that 1,800,000
potential donors are in the system already.
Going against her: the acute shortage of minority donors, including
African-Americans, like herself. The average wait for a bone-marrow transplant
for blacks is between one and two years.
"It (her disease) is so rare," Abella says. "This is the first case I've
seen all year in someone 18 or under."
And, meanwhile, the most precious currency of this city, a poor kid who
survived without hate, without despair, with dreams of building a better life
for people after her, must wait and take blood tests and hope a donor can be
found to give her a future.
"How has this changed you?"
She pauses. She bites her lip. "Well, I've been thinking about how I can
achieve my goals faster."
Faster?
She goes to college. She takes a bus to her fast-food night job. She works
an hour and a half just to pay cab fare home, so she doesn't have to worry
about getting shot at 2 a.m. And she dreams of building homeless shelters.
She is one of a thousand stories in this town that goes unnoticed in the
finger-pointing over welfare and urban renewal, and whose responsibility is it
anyway?
Nekita Burnett doesn't want to be anyone's responsibility. It's too late.
She already is. When she learned her fate, she held back the tears. She
didn't cry. She went home, made sure her mother was OK, then slipped into her
room, shut the door, sat on the bed and, finally, wept.
We have too many kids weeping in this city already. Too many we can't
help. Small world. Big problem.
Can't we do something?
To inquire about becoming a donor, call the national marrow donor program
at 1-800-MARROW-2, or 313-494-2748 locally.
THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED ARTICLE.
NEKITA BURNETT; BIOGRAPHY; SERIES; MARROW; DONOR; TELEPHONE