Tim and Tracy Smith share a running joke.

"We say that our honeymoon was spent in a two-bedroom apartment in Seattle with my mom and dad and my brother,"Tracy said.

While Tim and Tracy can smile at the experience now, back then it was no laughing matter. With cancer threatening Tracy's life, the couple had been forced to move their wedding date ahead two months so Tracy could have a bone-marrow transplant at the Hutchinson Center.

That was 18 years ago. Today, Tracy, 43, leads a normal lifestyle. "I work, have a family, keep a home — and try to keep up with my daughter,"she said. The family lives in Tulsa, Okla.

Tracy and Tim had been dating in 1985 when she developed some unexplained symptoms. After Tracy told Tim she'd noticed a tick fall off her, he immediately thought she might have Rocky Mountain spotted fever — a potentially fatal virus spread through tick bites — and urged her to visit an emergency clinic. I said, "Aw, come on. That's so farfetched,"she recalled.

The blood tests revealed that she had chronic myeloid leukemia, or CML, which causes the body to produce an overabundance of white blood cells, which crowd out other types of blood cells. "The CML was caught completely by accident,"she said. "I'm thankful for that little tick. We wouldn't have necessarily had a blood test taken, but we caught the disease early enough, before my white-cell counts were off the charts."

The early diagnosis gave Tracy and her family time to consider her treatment options. When they began leaning toward a bone-marrow transplant, their oncologist recommended the Hutchinson Center, which pioneered the still-evolving procedure.

In the meantime, Tim had proposed and Tracy had accepted. They made plans for a September wedding — after which Tracy would have her transplant. But when she had her initial visit to the Center in June, tests revealed that her white-cell counts were increasing rapidly. "They said they wanted to schedule me for a bone-marrow transplant in September,"she said. "It was either move the wedding up to July or wait a year."

Arriving as husband and wife, Tracy and Tim stayed in Seattle for three months, accompanied much of the time by her parents, Matthew and Carolyn Kane, and her brother, Paul Kane, who was her marrow donor.

Tracy said she always will remember the care she received at the Hutchinson Center. "The thing that impressed our family so much about the Hutchinson Center was the holistic approach they took to healing — spiritual, mental, physical, emotional,"she said. "Our whole family developed a fantastic relationship with the nurses. We continued to send Christmas cards and stay in touch with people for many, many years afterward."

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