ROCHESTER, Minn. — She arrived in Rochester last month to an empty apartment.
“Yeah, very empty,” Ashlyn Nystuen says.
Just a ceiling fan and her brother’s college futon occupy the main living area.
“It’s a work in progress,” Ashlyn says with a laugh.
But Ashlyn is not new to Rochester.
“It was February 2020,” she says. “And I came for a bone marrow transplant.”
Not even a year earlier, Ashlyn was finishing high school in Red Wing.
That fall, Ashlyn joined the soccer team at Dakota County Technical College, as she started work on her generals, unsure of her career path.
But soon, the goalie’s goal was just living.
“Her diagnosis was severe, or actually very severe, aplastic anemia,” Dr. Hassan Alkhateeb, Ashlyn’s Mayo Clinic doctor, says.
Left untreated, Dr. Alkhateeb minces no words about then-18-year-old Ashlyn’s prognosis.
“The patient, unfortunately, dies,” he says.
Ashlyn was swiftly approved for a bone marrow transplant. A match was found, and Ashlyn received the bone marrow of a man from Greece.
A grueling recovery followed, during which Ashlyn would spend three months between the hospital and a nearby transplant house.
“Too long from home,” she says.
One might think the last place she’d want to be is back at Mayo Clinic.
Yet, four years later, the once undecided college student is the newest registered nurse in Mayo Clinic’s bone marrow transplant unit.
“We’re in the room where I had my transplant,” she tells visitors. “It’s kind of like a full circle.”
Now, at age 23, Ashlyn works the same unit in which she battled to get her life back. It’s no coincidence. Ashlyn enrolled in nursing school at Rochester Community and Technical College with this hospital and this assignment as her new career goal.
She believed her experience could help other patients going through the same thing.
“I didn’t know I wanted to be a nurse until I got sick, and then I knew I wanted to work up here,” she tells BMT patient, Sue Wesley.
Sue is two days from her stem cell transplant to treat multiple myeloma.
“It’s reassuring that there is a good outcome,” she says. “And she’s very nice.”
Ashlyn remembers being near tears losing her hair, and the mayo nurse who helped her through it.
“He joked around the whole time as he was cutting it off,” she says. “It was a lot less traumatic because I had him cutting it off.”
And now?
“Yeah, now it’s back,” she says, smiling beneath her blonde locks.
“To go back and to give back,” Dr. Alkhateeb says, “speaks highly of what kind of a person she is.”
Four years after her bone marrow transplant, Ashlyn is caring for Mayo patients alongside the doctors and nurses who cared for her.
“I am very proud of her, she’s persevered,” says Michel Benz, the Mayo nurse manager who hired Ashlyn, first as a patient care assistant and then - upon completion of her degree - as a registered nurse.
The new nurse in Rochester arrived with the best kind of experience.
"I realized I wanted to support patients the way the nurses I had supported me," Ashlyn says.
Demand is especially high for people ages 18 to 35. Research shows young donors provide the greatest chance of success for transplant patients. More information on the need for young donors can be found by clicking here.