CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Every year about 264,000 women in the United States will find out they have breast cancer. Many families starting the journey won’t have any previous experience with it.
A breast cancer diagnosis can be overwhelming, isolating, and scary.
“I had no family history, so it was very [out of] left field for me," Jacinda Miller said. "It was my first mammogram."
Miller is through the toughest parts of her battle, finished with radiation and chemotherapy. But she didn’t do it alone.
“I would text her or call her and say, 'I feel like this, I don’t know what to do about that,' and she was quick to say, 'This is normal, this is what’s supposed to be happening, hang in there you’ve got this,'" Miller said. "She was one of my biggest cheerleaders."
Her nurse navigator Vicki Davidson was there every step of the way.
“I may get a little too attached to folks at times because they’re all special,” Davidson said.
Nurse navigators are meant to be a guide, breaking through the medical speak, making appointments and providing support during treatments and surgeries.
But spend an hour in the cancer institute with Davidson and it’s clearly much more than that. She knows every patient she works with on a deeply personal level, they hug and say ‘I love you’ to each other.
“I wear many hats and one of them is I just become a friend to a family, I hope,” Davidson said. “I think that health care a lot of times we’ve gotten away from that. And I don’t want a patient to feel like they’re part of a big machine, I want them to know they’re a person and I treat them as I would want to be treated myself.”
It's an invaluable relationship during an inconceivable time.
Contact Chloe Leshner at cleshner@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.