I had been employed for about one year as an oncol­ogy clin­i­cal tri­als nurse when I started study­ing for oncol­ogy nurs­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. At that point, I was just start­ing to shake off all of that first year new-ness—new to clin­i­cal tri­als in a brand new posi­tion and def­i­nitely new to oncol­ogy. Although not quite as intense as my first year out of school on a med-​​surg unit, the learn­ing curve was steep.

It didn’t take long to real­ize that “can­cer” is a com­pletely inad­e­quate word to describe a dis­ease so com­plex that affects so many peo­ple on both sides of the health­care equa­tion. With the men­tor­ship and encour­age­ment of my amaz­ing nurse col­leagues, I was able to sort out the adju­vants from neoad­ju­vants and found myself immersed in one of the great­est chal­lenges of my career—caring for indi­vid­u­als and fam­i­lies deal­ing with the effects of can­cer in their lives.

A can­cer diag­no­sis is at once highly spe­cific (Triple neg­a­tive? Adeno ver­sus squa­mous? EGFRvIII pos­i­tive?) and entirely gen­er­al­iz­able (Am I going to lose my job?  My fam­ily mem­ber?  My life?). Strik­ing the bal­ance between the two is what has me hooked. Earn­ing oncol­ogy nurs­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion last fall was exhil­a­rat­ing but not an end­point. It is a begin­ning and sig­nals my com­mit­ment to bal­anc­ing the sci­en­tific and the human, an art unique to nursing.