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Kailee Wells made it through her third marrow transplant, and in some ways that's the easy part, if there is anything easy about struggling to save a young girl's life.

The harder part comes with the waiting, the wondering whether the donor marrow cells will take hold this time, if the adjustments to the chosen medical intervention for the former Albuquerque girl will work this time, if all the pain and peril will bring her a normal life that lasts this time.

But this time seems different. This time, her mother says, is the last.

"If this doesn't work, there really is nothing else to try," Linda Wells wrote in an e-mail days before Kailee's third transplant, which took place Feb. 3 at the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where the family now lives.

"That is not to say it won't work," she said, her fragile optimism fainter than before. "It can. It's just hard to have hope when everything so far has failed in one way or another."

Kailee turned 10 last month, a full half of her life spent battling very severe aplastic anemia, a disease in which bone marrow cannot produce enough red blood cells.

Twice before, hope came in a marrow transplant - the first using cells that were not a perfect match but, in that harrowing moment when death hovered closer, were perfect enough; the second on Nov. 7, 2005, when a perfect donor seemed to miraculously appear just as hope and Kailee's health were failing.

Doctors had even pronounced Kailee anemia free after the second transplant. Her blood type had changed from the O she was born with to the B of her donor, a promising sign.

Then the blood counts diminished again, the need for blood transfusions increased again, and Kailee lost her brief foray into the normal world of going to school, playing with friends, swimming and not worrying quite so much that a stray bacteria or a common cold would kill her.

Last September, Kailee was infused with a stem cell boost from her perfect donor, a physician in China, the same country from which the Wellses adopted Kailee as an infant abandoned at an orphanage.

That the donor is from China, Linda Wells explained, is also why this third procedure is the last. Chinese policy allows only three attempts.

"Two and a half million minutes later, two transplants and a transplant boost later, where are we?" she wrote in an e-mail last month. "Staring down the throat of a black abyss, trying to focus on our one last shot, the last chance of making Kailee well."

It's as bleak as I have ever heard the woman I have come to know and love as strong, savvy and sane somehow through all of this.

"In some ways it was easier in the beginning," she continued. "We couldn't have imagined then all that has happened since. We didn't know then, couldn't comprehend what having a deathly ill child truly meant, didn't know what it felt like, couldn't imagine how watching your child tip-toe around the edges of life and death, day after day, imprisons your joy."

Kailee, the little girl whose thick dark hair comes and goes with chemotherapy, who precociously uses words like "in the sense that" and "shall," whose parents' quest to save her has also saved other children with their donor drives around the world, who vowed that she would prance about in a swimsuit and ride a horse if she could just be well, just wants it all to be over, her mother says.

"Kailee is Kailee," she wrote. "She is still a happy child most of the time."

Now, two weeks after the third and last transplant, hope and Kailee are rallying.

"I really am optimistic," Linda Wells wrote in her most recent missive. "I have stopped looking at the past treatments as failures and now see them as steps in a very long process. I have a renewed hope that this will be a great success and the final big step in Kailee's recovery."

So they wait again, snuggled in as a family against the cold Wisconsin winter winds, the snows, the hopelessness that keeps swirling just beyond, harder than before.