Bone Marrow Transplant Patient Inspired to Join the Medical Field

The chemotherapy had to be given in the hospital, with close follow up at the infusion center at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health two to three times per week. Peña's home in Niland was three hours away, making the logistics of her care nearly as challenging as the treatment itself. Peña and her mother had no housing in San Diego and no family nearby. Her mother, who has rheumatoid arthritis, was on disability and Peña could not work during her treatment.

"I said, Mom, how are we going to do this? La Jolla housing is so expensive," Peña recalled.

Fortunately, Peña came from a tight-knit family that lives in a small, close-knit community where word of her illness traveled fast. Through a connection from a cousin's extended family, they found a furnished apartment near the hospital. They temporarily suspended payments on their Imperial Valley home and their friends and family launched a fundraising campaign to help cover rent, food, and the cost of gas. Peña's former classmates from Calipatria High School donated to the campaign and Pena's auntie Isabel jumped in to help with a big portion of the rent.  

Peña and her mother stayed in La Jolla for a total of seven months. For four months before her transplant, she stayed close to the hospital while she cycled through rounds of chemotherapy, recovered from fevers and mouth sores, and slowly pushed her cancer toward remission. She stayed for another three months to recover following her transplant procedure.  

"The goal of that chemotherapy was to erase any detectable leukemia," said Tanaka. "Because if you do a stem cell transplant with leukemia still present, it won't work. And finding a donor takes two or more months on its own — it's a stranger out in the world, and they have to get health testing, make time in their schedule. There's a lot of coordination."

For Peña, the days that followed were anything but boring. She spent them mostly asleep.

"I would just open my eyes and go right back to sleep," she said. "The most I ate was four ounces at a time — my mom would buy these little containers with measurements. If I ate more, I would feel very sick."

Living with a Newborn Immune System

After a bone marrow transplant, the body must rebuild its immune system almost from scratch. Tanaka describes patients in this phase as being like newborns — their new donor-derived immune system is completely naive, having never encountered the world.

"Patients typically require months to recover to a normal level," she said. "Patients are on several antibiotics and immunosuppressive medicines so that the donor's immune system doesn't overwhelm their body and cause what's called graft-versus-host disease. They also have to redo all of their childhood vaccines, starting at six months after transplant and continuing for two years."

Graft-versus-host disease occurs when the donor's immune system begins attacking healthy tissues — causing rashes, gastrointestinal distress, or lung inflammation. Managing that balance, Tanaka explained, requires careful, constant attention: suppress the donor's immune response too much and you blunt the very mechanism curing the patient; too little and the body becomes a battleground.

For the first month after discharge, Peña had blood draws three times a week. Clinic visits continued every one to two weeks for the first three months. It was, as Tanaka put it simply, a huge commitment.

Peña's mother continued to be her anchor. When Peña was too weak to walk to her appointments, her mother pushed her in a wheelchair. It was not until January 2024 — more than six months after the transplant — that Peña says she could walk normally again.

"It took me a while," she said. "But eventually I got there."

Finding a Calling in the Hardest Years

Before her diagnosis, Peña worked as a pharmacy technician. It paid her bills, and she was good at it. But spending months inside UC San Diego Health — watching nurses move through the wards, tending to patients through the hardest days of their lives — changed something in her.

"Seeing nurses do what they do, it inspired me to become a hands-on health care worker," she said.

Once she was strong enough to stand for extended periods, she enrolled in a medical assisting program at CALRegional at Central Union Adult School. She graduated and now works within the program as an assistant skills instructor — teaching new students the physical foundations of clinical care: injections, blood draws, EKGs.

"I love helping students get into the medical field," she said. "I do eventually want to work in a clinic, but right now I really love what I'm doing — helping students put their foot in the door."

She also carries forward a perspective that only comes from having nearly lost everything.

"A lot of people take life for granted," she said. "They see the bad sides and don't see the good — those small things."

Ringing in Hope at the Padres Game

Peña is now in remission, continuing her follow-up care at UC San Diego Health. She is working, teaching, and living her life. Soon she will mark her journey with a moment she will not forget: being honored at a San Diego Padres game as part of the Ringing in Hope ceremony, a tradition that celebrates cancer patients by giving them the opportunity to ring the stadium's Ceremonial Mission Bell before a game.

Tanaka plans to be there, too.

"I am so happy that she gets to have this experience," said Tanaka. "She has been through so much and has such a positive attitude."

For Peña, the bell will mean something simple and enormous: she made it. The young woman who walked into the hospital for gallstones and came out with a cancer diagnosis, who spent seven months far from home with her mother by her side, who received the gift of a stranger's cells on the Fourth of July — she made it.

"I learned to look at life in a different way," she said. "I see the brighter sides now."