The Gift of a Good Cancer Nurse

Let’s get straight to the point: a good nurse can change your experience with cancer and cancer treatment.

I’ve been living with stage 4 cancer for over 10 years, and I’ve met a lot of nurses during that time. Fortunately, my nurses are a main reason I continue to find comfort at the clinic and treatment visits (I’ll ignore the nurse who once asked me “Are you sure you have more treatments?” when my schedule hadn’t been updated). My oncologist was kind and patient as I learned my diagnosis, but it was the nurses, whose kindness coupled with practical skill for the actual treatments, made it possible for me to walk through the hospital doors week after week.

The truth is that I wanted to see Barb’s smile and hear stories about Justine’s kids. I liked Cheryl’s strong hands. I wanted to know that life was continuing, that I wasn’t just a cancer diagnosis but a person with a life and interests outside of the hospital. Early on, I needed the matter-of-fact attitude of my nurses. They were warm but also efficient, a reminder to me that people get treated for all kinds of cancer every single day of the year. I might be scared and on unsteady ground, but I had good shepherds to get me through.

At my diagnosis, I was a health care novice for anything illness related. There was so much to learn and so many questions I didn’t know enough to ask. Because I was in the treatment room every week for six months, I had a lot of time to ask my treatment nurses a lot of questions. I could have searched for answers on the internet, but it feels so much better to get that answer and reassurance from a human. That moment of sharing a question that comes from fear, concern, or just lack of knowledge and being rewarded with information and human recognition is not replaceable by a machine spewing out AI answers.

One of the worst parts of my first 6 months of treatment was having my port removed due to clots, which meant getting a taxane chemo, Herceptin (trastuzumab) and Perjeta (pertuzumab) intravenously (through an IV). There were a few weeks with so many attempts to get an IV in that the nurses would pull my curtain closed to just let me cry and regain my composure. It was awful with a capital A. It was a very competent nurse, Freya, who, after searching for a vein using a portable ultrasound, told me to drink a lot of water during the 24 hours prior to treatment. She said it wasn’t enough to wake up and drink a bunch of water a few hours ahead of time. The key was to be truly well-hydrated. Unbelievably, that one piece of advice worked, and I rarely have a difficult time getting IVs to this day. Practical knowledge is the secret weapon of nursing — make sure you let them share it with you!

A good nurse and comfort go hand in hand, at least in my life with cancer. My first true experience of this happened after hospitalization over Memorial Day weekend in 2015. I can still vividly recall how difficult those four days were, an IV left in my arm for the entire time, hurting. On the last day, I was released to the cancer center for treatment, with that IV in my arm. I can still feel the emotions of entering the treatment area and being called in by Justine. She took one look at me and said, “What happened to you?!” It felt safe to express the fear of the last week, and it was a comfort to have her remove that old IV, clean me up, and start treatment in a quiet place. I hope nurses understand just how much some of us need their comfort as much as their knowledge. There are times when we are scared, and the safety of a familiar face and procedure means so much.

Nurses have looked out for me all along this road. They’ve been there when I felt alone, scared, confused, and more. There hasn’t been a time when they’ve tried to reassure me with empty promises of hope or false positivity. They tell me that it’s okay to feel how I feel but that we still keep moving forward. That there are things we can do to make life better. They ask about my kids, my bike rides, my travels, my mom and dad. In short, they work to make a connection.

Every May, there’s a Nurse’s Appreciation Week, but I suspect lots of us appreciate our nurses every day we get up and keep counting up from that cancer diagnosis.

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