A Childhood Bone Marrow Transplant Led Dustin Back to Oklahoma Children’s OU Health

If you walk the corridors of Oklahoma Children’s OU Health Jimmy Everest Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders in Children, you’ll probably find 39-year-old Dustin Brown heading to teach a chemotherapy class or onboarding a new nurse. He knows these hallways well, having first walked them as a patient when he was 4 years old.

To look at Dustin’s life and how it has come full circle, it’s hard to imagine that his story began with an ear infection.

A Disease That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen to Children

In 1991, Dustin had recurrent ear infections that led to frequent doctor visits. During an appointment, a physician found that Dustin had an enlarged spleen, and he was referred to the Jimmy Everest Center. The diagnosis was chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), Philadelphia chromosome positive.

CML is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow that causes the body to produce too many abnormal white blood cells. Over time, those cells crowd out healthy ones, making it harder for the body to fight infection, carry oxygen, and clot normally. Left untreated, it is fatal.

“This was an adult male disease,” Dustin said. “Males 50 and older get this disease. To this day, less than 5% of kids get this diagnosis.”

The only known cure was a stem cell transplant from an unrelated donor, and Oklahoma Children’s was just beginning to offer that level of care. Dustin’s physician traveled specifically to train for the procedure. When he returned, Dustin would be his first transplant patient.

What Is a Stem Cell Transplant?

A stem cell transplant replaces a patient’s diseased bone marrow with healthy stem cells from a donor. The donor’s cells travel to the bone marrow and begin producing healthy blood cells, which rebuild the patient’s immune system from scratch. When the donor is an unrelated stranger — as in Dustin’s case — it is called an allogeneic transplant, and finding a match can take months or even years.

For Dustin, finding a donor match took two years and during the wait, he received daily injections to keep the cancer at bay.

Day Zero

On March 24, 1993, 6-year-old Dustin received his donor’s cells. He had spent weeks undergoing total body irradiation to prepare him for the transplant.

Post transplant, Dustin spent four months in the hospital. He had a triple-lumen central line (a tube with three separate ports implanted in his chest) to deliver medications and fluids that his nurses called his pigtails. His grandmother stayed at his bedside when his parents couldn’t be there, and during the rare windows when the IV lines were disconnected, he was able to play with his favorite Ninja Turtle toys. Those ordinary moments between treatments are among Dustin’s happiest memories of the whole ordeal.

“They would make 30-minute to one-hour windows where I could play,” he said. “It was very rare. But when it happened, it was a big deal.”

By the time he was 8, Dustin was off all medication. He showed no signs of cancer.

The Moment Everything Shifted

During an annual checkup, 17-year-old Dustin was asked by his physician if he would speak to a young girl struggling with a similar cancer diagnosis. He said yes without hesitation, and the weight of the moment hit him hard. He was sobbing as he walked through the door, before even saying a single word.

“Just walking in, I felt like I had already given that girl hope before I even said anything,” Dustin said. In that moment, he knew he wanted to become a pediatric oncology nurse and work in the place where he had spent much of his childhood.

Coming Back

Dustin graduated from the University of Oklahoma Fran and Earl Ziegler College of Nursing in 2012 and joined Oklahoma Children’s, ultimately choosing to work on the very unit where he had been a patient. He spent 6 ½ years at the bedside before moving into his current role as clinical education specialist for pediatric hematology, oncology, and stem cell transplant.

His colleagues developed a name for the conversations he would have with patients who were losing hope — “Dustin talks.” One was with a 15-year-old with relapsed leukemia who was starting to give up.

“I told her: I got counted out once. I had a 10% chance of making it, and here I am, taking care of you. If you’re not going to fight, what’s the point?”

Not only did she beat cancer, but she also went on to attend nursing school.

“All the awards don’t mean anything compared to this.”

A Letter Arrives

In November 2025, Dustin received a letter from the OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center transplant and cellular therapy program. OU Health had been storing two bags of donor bone marrow from his 1993 transplant and needed to know what to do with them. Something occurred to him as he read it.

“I thought, there’s no way these are my cells,” he said. “Mine are predisposed to turn into CML. These have to be my donor’s.”

A call confirmed the cells belonged to his donor. He asked a question that had been with him for three decades: How difficult would it be to find his donor?

The answer came the next day when he was told that he had access to that information. By the time Dustin returned from a December vacation, transplant coordinators confirmed that the donor had agreed to meet with Dustin.

On a Thursday evening in January 2026, Dustin sat with his wife and dialed his donor’s phone number.

Thirty-Three Years

The person on the other end of the line was Don Spence, 68, who had spent most of his life in Texas and the last three decades in Pennsylvania. But two years in Dallas in the mid-1980s changed everything.

When a close friend was diagnosed with leukemia, there was a push among those who knew him to join the National Marrow Donor Program registry. It required nothing more than a cheek swab, so Don signed up. His friend didn’t find a match in time, but Don remained on the list.

About five years later, in 1993, he received a call to tell him he was a possible match. After additional testing, it was confirmed that Don was a perfect match for a 6-year-old boy in Oklahoma with a very rare type of leukemia.

“In my heart it was absolutely yes,” Don said. “But we had to work some things out in my brain and with my wife too. It was a big deal.”

He had never been under general anesthesia, and he had young children of his own, including a newborn daughter, Clare. The donation would require surgery with multiple needle sticks into the pelvis to harvest the marrow, an overnight hospital stay, and a recovery with bruises and soreness. He and his wife, Meg, talked it through. When they looked at their son, David, who was 4 years old — almost exactly the age Dustin had been when he was first diagnosed, they had their answer.

“If we were in the same situation as that little boy’s parents,” Don said, “we would want someone to do that for us. After that, it was a slam dunk.”

Don was admitted to Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas the night before the procedure. The donation was completed the following day, and that afternoon he went home. He described recovering as feeling like he’d been kicked by a horse — his whole backside was black and blue for days, but he never once regretted it.

Through the National Marrow Donor Program, Don sent a remote-control car to the little boy in Oklahoma, knowing only that he was 6 and loved basketball. About a year later, Dustin’s mother, Linda, called Don out of the blue to thank him. She put 7-year-old Dustin on the phone.

“He just said, thank you, Mr. Spence,” Don recalled. “It was very touching.”

Linda sent Don VHS tapes, which included news footage of Dustin in the hospital, and then a video of him playing basketball in a gymnasium with other kids. He was healthy and full of life. Don kept the tapes, and they still sit on a shelf in his home office.

Don settled in Pennsylvania and was called years later to donate marrow a second time — this time to a 50-year-old man on the West Coast. Don had been a perfect match twice, and it was extraordinarily rare.

Dustin reached out to Don, and after 32 years, they were finally facing one another on FaceTime, sharing their stories.

“I’m just blessed I was a small part of Dustin becoming the man he is today,” Don said. “And how he’s devoted his life to these kids — he’s so giving. It’s just a fantastic story.”

For Dustin, the call was a chance to show Don the full shape of what his decision had made possible — the nurses he had trained, the families he had sat with, the 15-year-old who had gone on to become a nurse herself, and the countless other children he had helped for 14 years.

“I was able to express my gratitude,” Dustin said. And one day, he hopes to give Don a hug in person.

What It Means to Heal Oklahoma

Dustin turns 40 in September. For 14 years, he has worked in the same place he once stayed as a sick little boy, and now he has been able to truly thank the man who made that possible. Dustin has used the gift of life to teach new nurses, develop training for emerging therapies like chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (CAR-T cell therapy), and occasionally give one of his talks. His life has not been easy, but he sees it as answering a calling.

“You don’t go through this to keep it to yourself,” Dustin said. “Use it for good. Bring light into people’s lives.”

OU Health, the University of Oklahoma’s academic health system, is where Dustin nearly lost his life, where he was saved, and where he now helps others heal.

Oklahoma Children’s OU Health is home to more pediatric experts than anywhere else in Oklahoma, supported by the clinical care, research, and education that forms the backbone of an academic health system.

Learn more about blood and marrow transplant therapy and cancer care at the Jimmy Everest Center or call (405) 271-2222.