DNP Student Wilson's Story Profiled in Minority Nurse

Melisa Wilson, DNP student, shared her story with Michele Wojciechowski for the Minority Nurse feature "A Breast Cancer Diagnosis Brings a Nurse Closer to Her Patients." The article was then re-posted by MedPage Today. In the article, Wilson, who is the Clinical Operations Director and Pulmonary Hypertension Program Coordinator at AdventHealth Orlando, shares her own experiences with breast cancer and how that has impacted how she relates to her patients and now her mom, who was recently also diagnosed with breast cancer.

Excerpt 

A few years ago, Wilson says, she had a patient who was scared about having a line placed in her chest. This needed to be done for infusion of pulmonary hypertension treatment. The patient experienced a lot of pain due to being on a subcutaneously infused machine. “One day I called her and asked for her to come in for an office visit with me. I explained that I had done as much as I could to manage her pain, and she needed to consider a different route of infusion. She was tearful and upset. She was concerned about her body image,” says Wilson. “I showed her my port, though it was different and showed her my head, which was hairless due to chemo. I told her, ‘I understand what it is like for your body to change in front of your eyes, but these are the things we do to survive.’ We cried together, and she went on to have the line placed.”