At age 14, while most young adults are embarking on one of the biggest developmental milestones of their lives and preparing for their freshman year of high school, current Kettering University student Caitlyn Ulinski instead found herself faced with a life-disrupting shift.

She started to notice unexplainable bruises on her body and a rash breaking out on her skin. She had strange spots on her legs and arms and noticed blood sores in her mouth. She was becoming more and more easily fatigued. Her parents took her to see the doctor, but the only immediate feedback they could provide was that her blood counts were extremely low. The family could only speculate at what could be wrong with Caitlyn.

According to her sister Elizabeth (Liz) Ulinski, the next three weeks after they initially took Caitlyn to the doctor were the most excruciating three weeks for the family. Without timely answers, it was easy to jump to conclusions and consider the possibility that Caitlyn could have a rare disease or virus, or worse, leukemia or some other type of cancer.

After those painful three weeks of repetitive blood draws and medical tests, Ulinski was finally diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia, a rare blood disorder where the body stops producing enough new blood cells. Aplastic anemia is so rare that in the United States, only about 600-900 people are diagnosed each year, according to the Aplastic Anemia and MDS International Foundation. If the condition isn’t treated aggressively, it can be fatal.

After a bone marrow biopsy, the doctors informed the family that Ulinski needed a bone marrow transplant, and if they could find a donor, and if her body didn’t reject the transplant, then her chances to lead a normal life after recovery were good. At that point her family made a gameplan. They all agreed to be tested to see if they were a possible match, and if they were, they would donate their bone marrow to her. If a match wasn’t found within the family, the doctors would access the national bone marrow registry to look for a match. Finding a perfect bone marrow match is similar to the organ donation and transplant process—there are many blood and genetic attributes that must match perfectly in order for the recipient’s body to accept the transplant. Most of the time in these situations, even close family members are not exact matches. Caitlyn’s parents were not a match. Luckily, Liz, who was 17 at the time, turned out to be a 10-out-of-10 match.

“Making the decision to be Caitlyn's donor was, in a lot of ways, the easiest decision I have ever made,” Liz Ulinski said. "I can remember immediately saying ‘OK’ the second they told me I was a perfect match. I wasn't nervous, I wasn't scared; I just wanted to help my sister. Up to that point, all I had been able to do was be there for her. As the older sibling, watching your younger sister have to go through something like that ... you just want to make it go away. You want to make her better. So the minute they told me I potentially could, I was all on board. There was no deliberating or deciding; there was just, ‘how soon can we do this?’”

Caitlyn Ulinski describes the bone marrow transplant process as if it was just another ordinary medical procedure. The toughest part, she said, was not the surgery or the pain, but the emotional hardship she dealt with after the transplant. For a patient with severe aplastic anemia, chemotherapy is administered because the original, unhealthy cells must be removed in order for them to be replaced with healthy donor cells. She lost all of her hair, which, to a 14-year-old girl, is devastating. She was on anti-rejection drugs for six months after the transplant, which lowered her body’s ability to reject the transplant and significantly weakened her immune system. For the rest of her freshman year, she had to recover at home. She couldn’t go to classes, play on the soccer team, try out for the school play, or socialize with her friends between classes. She taught herself her coursework at home, kept up with required reading and homework, and took exams alone in a room with her mom or dad proctoring her.

When she went back to high school as a sophomore, she started over again, feeling a little behind the game when it came to her friendships. But academically, she didn’t miss a step. She joined the soccer team and eventually found herself in a pre-engineering class where she realized that she wanted to become an electrical engineer.

She enrolled at Kettering and started classes in July 2014. While she was on her work term this past October, she found herself often thinking back to that time in her life when she beat her illness. As she shared her story with new friends and colleagues, she realized that there is a lack of awareness about conditions like her's and the critical need for bone marrow donors.

She knew her assignment. She had to organize a bone marrow drive on campus. She got in touch with Carrie Green from the Be the Match Foundation and asked her friend Jake Cleary and his brothers in the Delta Tau Delta fraternity to help her because she knew she couldn’t do all of this on her own. Much like her sister years ago, they answered with, “how soon can we do this?”

All the Kettering students she was working with to organize the drive were also on work term at the time, but via emails and calls they managed to put a plan in place. They held the bone marrow drive on Wednesday, March 4.

“I was going to be happy if we got 10 people willing to add their names to the registry,” Ulinski said. “After we told people about the process and that it’s not that painful, that the myths aren’t true, then people started to come around. It’s just like giving blood except the stem cells are filtered out and separated, and then your blood is replaced back into your system.” 

The team set up a table for six hours in the Great Court.

They were shocked at their success -- Ulinski and her team inspired 60 people to be donors.

“It really moved me how much people cared,” she said.

To be added to the bone marrow registry, sign up here and use the promo code “deltataudelta” to track Ulinski’s and Delta Tau Delta’s continued campaign. To contact Be the Match with questions or for more information, email Carrie Green at cgreen2@nmdp.org. To get in touch with Caitlyn Ulinski, reach her via email at ulin0251@kettering.edu.