Nursing Graduate Finds Rewards In Caring For Cancer Patients
Kylie Sams has found her calling as a nurse in Cancer Care.
Since you're reading this, you have a connection with education, a part of the "helping" professions, an informally knit assemblage of "givers." They share a desire to pass along not only academic information but lessons they've learned in life. Teachers like to share their scholarship and the knowledge they've spent years acquiring, but most also want to help make the road easier for their students than it was for them. Sometimes students drop out of classes or programs, and losing one or two can be unsettling, but it is not a matter of life or death.
The practice of medicine is also one of giving, but the consequences of mistakes and failure are absolute. Medical professionals have a similar goal of helping and serving, and they derive enormous emotional rewards from saving a life in the ER, handing a mother her perfect newborn baby, restoring the vision of a person nearly blinded by cataracts. With those possibilities, why does a person make a deliberate choice to work with cancer patients, people suffering from a disease associated with hopelessness? Where the successes seem to be the exception. When there is no instant gratification.
Kylie Sams, a 2003 graduate of the A-B Tech ADN program now working at Cancer Care as an oncology nurse, says the rewards and the successes are far greater than one could imagine. From the time she was growing up in the Big Pine Community, Kylie knew she wanted to be a nurse. When she was a little older and had two small brothers, her mother, Cathy Fowler, went to A-B Tech to study nursing and now teaches CNA classes at the Madison campus. Cathy says, "I could never have gone to school without Kylie. She told me she would take care of her little brothers without my even asking her. She made it possible for me to take classes, study, and go through those long clinical hours."
With her mother a nurse and her father then an EMT, discussions about medicine and illnesses and life and death were common in the Fowler household when Kylie was growing up. She went through the health occupations program at Madison High School, was trained as a CNA, and earned a full scholarship to Berea, where she planned to study nursing. But after a semester of homesickness, she came home and took a factory job as a machine operator.
In 1999, she married and went to work as a CNA at Elderberry Healthcare to get into the medical field. After the birth of her daughter Kaitlyn, Kylie continued to work full-time and began taking general education classes the A-B Tech RN program required. "All along I knew I still wanted to be a nurse, and I knew A-B Tech would 'always be there.'" She applied to the nursing program when she had enough credits and was accepted.
Oncology is a fairly recent addition to the RN curriculum. Students have traditionally spent rotations at hospitals in various departments: Mother/Baby, Orthopedics, Cardiology, and other specialties, but oncology was not one of the choices in the past. Tena Messer, Nurse Practitioner at Cancer Care and a 1989 A-B Tech graduate said, "When I was in school, oncology was an area that just didn't come up as one of the clinical rotations. I don't know the reason, but it wasn't until Penny Stollery began teaching in the program that it became an option for clinical specialty."
According to nursing instructor Laura Brown, it was Penny who not only began the specialization, but who carried it through to its being fully established. "Penny was passionate about oncology," Kylie said, "and it caught fire with me, but it wasn't a program a nursing student could just drift into by accident. We had to apply for it and sell ourselves in a letter affirming our interest and the reason we were drawn to it. We had to be accepted into it."
In April of this year, she spent four days in Anaheim, CA, attending seminars sponsored by the Oncology Nursing Society. Of the over 500 nurses nationwide who applied for scholarships to attend the conference, Kylie was one of only 20 to win the $1,000 stipend. The lodging was provided, and she spent the money on airfare to LA. "It was wonderful. I'd never even been to Georgia, and to go across the country on an airplane as my first flying experience was exciting. The nurse I was paired with for the seminar had been president of the ONS the year before, and going through the classes with her was an exceptional opportunity. The courses were intense, like being in school all day long, and I learned so much."
Kylie is the first nurse with the A-B Tech oncology specialization hired by Cancer Care, an outpatient treatment facility at the corner of Victoria Road and Biltmore Avenue. She worked for a year on 10 North, the cancer wing of Mission Hospitals, and enjoyed it, but their system didn't include nurses in total provision of treatment. Kylie explained: "The pharmacy gets the orders and measures and mixes the chemotherapy solutions. Then an IV team starts the administration. The RN monitors the lines, and there is bedside patient interaction that is rewarding, but it didn't let me have the total involvement in treatment I wanted."
At Cancer Care she is able to give not only the direct emotional support essential to gently guiding a patient through what can be a long, exhausting, and daunting experience, but she can also have the responsibility for reading the orders, accessing and preparing the solution, and administering it. "The people I care for are so grateful for the treatment we provide. Just a reassuring touch on the arm can make an enormous difference to them. Here they are, enduring the dreadful side effects of chemotherapy, and they thank us for our help. People who ask why I chose cancer nursing would not wonder any more if they could see the people I treat. They have beaten the odds."
Kylie and her mother are considering going to Western or ETSU together to earn BSN degrees. Cathy, who went through both the LPN and ADN programs at A-B Tech, wants to teach in the RN program, and Kylie says of herself that she might eventually get an MSN and perhaps become a nurse practitioner, a medical achievement level that opens the door to a significant responsibility level. "If I wanted to, I could even open my own medical practice." She adds, "I'm only 25, and I have plenty of time to pursue whatever path I want to take. Right now, I love the work I do, the people I work with, and the people I care for. What happens at Cancer Care is so much more than 'medicine.' It's giving support and hope to people whose lives our treatment can enrich and prolong and whose health we can help to improve. I hope I'll be able to see one of my patients come back as a ten-year survivor who is still cancer-free."
The people who know her are not surprised that she has accomplished so much. Connie Buckner, Director of the A-B Tech Madison Site says of her, "While Kylie was going to classes here on our campus, she was working at Elderberry Healthcare and was also the pianist for her church. She did all of this while she managed a home and cared for a child."
Kylie agrees with the observation made by Ginger Chapman, Clinical Nurse Manager at Cancer Care: "When we realize that dying is the natural end of life and is something that happens to all of us, it is easier to comprehend and accept. Being diagnosed with cancer is a life-changing experience, but there is always hope that the treatment we provide will give our patients many more years of comfortable, productive living. Besides the treatment, an equally important part of what we do is to connect with our patients and their families. It is an unbelievably rewarding field to be in, and I wouldn't want to work in any other kind of medicine."
Kylie added, "I hope people who read this will have a better understanding now of why I chose cancer as my field of nursing."