Beth Sandy, MSN, CRNP, FAPO
I cannot talk about why I went into oncology without first talking about why I became a nurse. Growing up, my mom was a nurse on an inpatient medical-surgical unit. She would work every other weekend, and part time when she needed to, particularly the years before I entered school.
I was always so amazed when at the pediatrician’s office she would know exactly what they were talking about. I had childhood asthma, and the doctor would talk about medications like theophylline, albuterol, and, at times, prednisone. These were such big words to a child, but my mom would talk with him on a professional level, fully understanding everything he was saying. It was very comforting to me as a child, but also, I really looked up to her as an intelligent woman, and I really wanted to be like her.
When I went to college, I immediately declared nursing as my major. However, in my sophomore year of college, one of my closest high school friends was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma when we were 19 years old. I was busy with college life and playing a Division I college sport, but I did my best to carve out time to see her. The worst year was when she had a bone marrow transplant at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD. This was a fairly new procedure in 1996 from my memory. Our friend Krista and I drove there from Philadelphia, but we barely got to see her because she was vomiting and in much pain from post-herpetic neuralgia. Clutching our get well soon foil balloons, we cried and cried in the hallway of the NIH hospital. I will never forget it.
Kim died in the fall of 1997, during my senior field hockey season at Temple University. This experience cemented my desire to go into oncology. The complex things the nurses and doctors did for her, the compassion they showed, and the obvious need for quality health care professionals in oncology were the reasons I dedicated my career to patients with cancer. I have never regretted it for a single moment, and perhaps, the opposite: I have loved oncology and have myself been healed in a way to be able to give back to patients and their caregivers. Whether you go into oncology because of a deeply personal experience or because that was the open position when you applied, I think we are all bonded by the experience of caring for patients who are going through a very scary and difficult battle, and that makes us a unique team.
