My name is Ahty Johnson, born and raised in NYC. My entire life I’ve been an elite athlete. In 2010, during my senior year of high school I was training extremely hard preparing for college when I noticed my body started to shut down. I chalked up my fatigue and muscle tightness to over training, but I knew there was an issue when I couldn’t finish track practice and had difficulties going up the stairs. After extensive testing I was diagnosed with severe Aplastic Anemia. Aplastic Anemia is a result of bone marrow damage and a rare condition in which the body stops producing enough new blood cells. My choices of treatment were a bone marrow transplant, or a medication treatment called ATG. At the time I had no donor matches on the registry and my immediate family weren’t a match. I was forced to receive the ATG treatment with the hopes that it will work. It was difficult for me as I was a top five recruit in the nation at the time and my new life consisted of hospitals and homeschooling. Fortunately, I started to see results about seven months after treatment and I was able to obtain a partial track scholarship to the University of South Carolina, where I later became a nationally ranked sprinter.

My experience with Aplastic Anemia opened my eyes to the lack of registered African American donors on the bone marrow registry. Bone marrow and stem cell transplants are matched by ethnicity. Currently there are less than 1 MILLION registered African American donors. African Americans only have a 23% of finding a full match compared to 77% with White Americans. Bone marrow transplants cure patient’s with blood cancers and disorders including leukemia, lymphoma, sickle cell, aplastic anemia, myelodysplastic syndrome etc.

I found a new passion in volunteering with different organizations to register potential donors. I have worked with DKMS and Be the Match to educate and register donors. I recently started Mission Marrow to host my own drives with the assistance of Be the Match. To date I’ve registered over 200 donors and at least 3 people have saved a life.

In 2019, I received news that my bone marrow didn’t properly recover from Aplastic Anemia and I was given a new diagnosis called Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS). MDS is a group of disorders caused when something disrupts the production of blood cells. Myelodysplastic syndrome will progress to leukemia if untreated. My doctors informed me that I needed a bone marrow transplant. I was advocating for so many patients and now I needed a donor. After almost 10 years of being on the registry I still didn’t have a full match. Thankfully with advanced new research I was able to obtain a haploidentical stem cell transplant (half-match) from my mom. My official transplant date was October 17,2019. I’m currently still dealing with different side effects from my transplant, but I wake up every day with a positive attitude and the mindset that one day things will get better.