Kathleen Haden, ANP, is an authorized grownup nurse practitioner (ANP) at UVA Cancer Center. Before coming to Charlottesville, she labored with sufferers on the National Cancer Institute on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, NY.
Haden can also be concerned in medical analysis and helps sufferers perceive their pancreatic most cancers danger on the High Risk Pancreatic Cancer Screening Clinic.
Meet a Charlottesville-Based Cancer Nurse Practitioner
We requested Haden our 7 fast questions.
1. What has most impressed and formed your method to affected person care?
The medical developments in oncology and the place we have come, and watching it remedy many cancers that I believed would by no means be curable.
When I did this in 1985, it was throughout the HIV pandemic, which was horrible to witness. The sufferers had been all on the oncology flooring. At NIH, we had been the one place that had all the brand new medicine. People got here from all around the world to get these medicine that weren’t FDA-approved. And to see the event of oncology, chemotherapy brokers, biologics, and now immunotherapy that cures metastatic illness is simply mind-boggling.
You know, we have develop into so exact when it comes to treating tumors. You take the tumor and check it and determine the lock and key, which medicine will work for it. It’s fairly wonderful. So the essential science, the molecular science, after which matching that tumor with medicine — it has been fairly mind-boggling to expertise.
2. What’s your favourite a part of your job?
The individuals. Working with sufferers and creating collaborative relationships with my friends.
3. What’s your largest concern while you’re a affected person?
I would like somebody that is very educated and understands my explicit illness or case and has researched it, has learn the literature, and could be very well-informed.
4. What do you do for stress aid?
I discovered yoga due to caring for sufferers with most cancers. Dealing with the stress of loss of life and dying and the opposite repercussions of the sickness led me to yoga and meditation. And I’m additionally a giant hiker and former runner.
Facing Cancer?
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5. Dogs or cats?
Dogs.
6. What’s the final film you noticed? Thumbs up or down?
I by no means watch motion pictures anymore. I feel it was Bridgerton, the film. Probably thumbs down.
7. What’s the perfect recommendation you’ve got ever heard?
“True leaders open the door for others.” I all the time take into consideration that after I work in groups.