INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Most nurses decide they want to be a nurse sometime during their schooling, maybe during a career day or in health class, but Jaelyn Kiechelow is a little different.

She was a heart patient as a teen, and one of the sickest Methodist Hospital has seen. Laying there in that hospital bed, she looked around and said “I can do this too.”

Today, if you’re looking for Kiechelow, you can find her working as a nurse in the cardiac vascular critical care unit at Methodist Hospital.

Sometimes, she is in room seven taking care of patients in the exact spot where she recovered from a heart transplant surgery in 2022.

Her story started when she was just 14 years old back in 2012, when she was rushed from a track meet in Avon to Methodist Hospital. It is still unclear why first responders brought her to an adult hospital as a teen, but she eventually received some care at Riley Hospital for Children.

“My coronary artery tore. They call that a heart attack,” Kiechelow said. “We went into emergency surgery. I had to have a bypass surgery, an open heart surgery on my heart, and then coming out of surgery, my heart function was only at 20% or so.”

Kiechelow’s story spans a decade. She suffered a lot as a teen with cardiac problems, but got better for a period. She was about to start her last semester of nursing school when she was forced to put a pause on her education to receive a heart transplant at 24.

“The whole time, all I could keep thinking was I couldn’t go back to school,” Kiechelow said. “I am very much a school girly, like, I wanted to get it over with. This is my dream job. So, having to pause on my dreams to make sure I was okay so I could take care of other people, I didn’t understand it at first.”

Kiechelow’s transplant came after a decade of fighting for her life. She was put on ECMO, a machine reserved for the sickest heart and lung patients.

“It’s the highest level of life support we have to offer someone outside of the operating room,” said Dennis Disney, an IU Health respiratory therapist. “For me, it’s almost incomprehensible for her to have gone through what she went through in 2012, chose to pursue nursing, had the speedbump during her schooling. For her to wind up here with us? Pretty remarkable.”

Kiechelow now works with many of the same staff members who personally oversaw her care both in 2012 and 2022. Disney is one of these colleagues. It is a surreal experience for him and other healthcare workers.

“She’s the first that I am aware of that was on ECMO, and then came back later to work with us,” Disney said.

Kiechelow is a symbol of hope on the floor for the many providers who know her story.

“If you met Jaelyn Kiechelow, she is a category 5 hurricane,” Disney said. “She is a force of nature.”

Tim Smith is a registered nurse and was assigned Kiechelow as a patient, but his job was to manage her ECMO machine, not be her nurse. He knows how hard she fought to stand in their unit as a nurse today.

“She’s an inspiration to us because we do know, and we remember her as that little 14-year-old girl,” Smith said. “She just inspired us. We were inspired before we even knew she was coming back to us. We were inspired that she survived.”

“She’s a gift to us as her peers and she may not realize this, but as she gains time in the unit, she will come to realize this,” Disney said. “The greatest gift we get as caregivers is when people come back.”

Kiechelow does not want to be the center of attention, she just wants to be a good nurse, but she knows that sometimes her patients need support from someone who truly knows their pain.

“The ones that just kinda seem anxious. The ones that are just kinda like they don’t know if they’re going to make it out of the hospital safe,” Kiechelow said. “Those are the people that I confide in. So, you asked me earlier, why? And that’s my why. I can be that advocate for my patients and I can also relate to them.”

Kiechelow estimates she has only ever told four patients that she had a heart transplant.

Kiechelow knows her heart is a gift and wants others to know that organ donation gave her everything.

For Kiechelow, her story is not over. She has to maintain her gift of a transplant heart through medication and a healthy lifestyle. She knows this gift has allowed her to take care of countless patients in the way nurses once cared for her.