Lifelines
Nurses answer calls for stem cell donations

In nursing school, seeing the bond between kids who had cancer and their nurses made Jessica Brown, RN, realize she’d found her professional calling.
“Patients would come in and the nurses would know them,” Brown said.
“They’d be asking, ‘How’s your dog? How’s your grandma?’”
As a student nurse on an oncology rotation, Brown was soon bonding with patients, too. Sometimes, a child had endured many unsuccessful rounds of chemo and radiation “and then finally got the call that they found a match for transplant,” said Brown, now a pediatric oncology nurse at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. “Seeing that glimmer of hope in a kid’s face really moved me.”
Stem cell transplants can be used to treat life-threatening blood cancers and other diseases, immune disorders, and metabolic conditions. These transplants, which replace a patient’s immune system with a new one, are often the only hope for a cure. Just 30% of patients have matching donors in their families, meaning most rely on the National Marrow Donor Program to find a match from a stranger. When she learned how many people need donors, Brown joined the donor registry.
“I feel very lucky that this is my job, working with these patients every day, because I understand how much this procedure can change a patient’s life.”
Pediatric oncology nurse Lindsay Parkinson
Last year, Brown and her colleague Lindsay Parkinson, RN, also a pediatric oncology nurse at Stanford Medicine, received calls that they had matched with patients who needed stem cells. Like Brown, Parkinson was inspired to sign up as a donor while in nursing school.
“I feel very lucky that this is my job, working with these patients every day, because I understand how much this procedure can change a patient’s life,” Parkinson said. “Our kids at Stanford Children’s are anywhere from a 6-month-old baby who got a transplant to people in their late 20s. I work with all oncology patients, but I feel an especially strong connection to the stem cell transplant patients.”
The transplants use cells from either the bloodstream — known as peripheral blood stem cells — or bone marrow.
Brown flew to Seattle in July 2024 for a peripheral blood stem cell donation. She was hooked to two IVs for about five hours while a machine separated her blood-forming stem cells from the rest of her blood and returned the remaining blood to her.
“It’s a remarkable thing to be able to give a part of ourselves to help someone else.”
Pediatric oncology nurse Jessica Brown
Two months later, Parkinson flew to Los Angeles to donate bone marrow to her match. She went through a surgical procedure during which doctors drew liquid marrow from the back of her pelvic bone.
“It’s really meaningful,” Parkinson said. “I feel like it connects me to these patients in another way, to help start the process for someone and hope they have a healthy and happy life after that.”
Brown’s call about the donor match came soon after she had provided end-of-life care for a few beloved patients, whose deaths had left her feeling bereft.
“Getting the call reignited hope in me,” she said. “It was exactly what I needed, in a strange way.”
The donor registry is seeking donors from a wide variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds. Those who want to register can learn more at http://stan.md/ToDonate.
Said Brown, “It’s a remarkable thing to be able to give a part of ourselves to help someone else.”
A version of this story was first published in the Stanford Medicine Children’s Health Healthier, Happy Lives blog in September 2024.