Nursing Student Uses Her Learnings to Detect Cancer

Joanna Gagis talks with Kathleen Kelley, Associate Professor and Assistant Director at Caldwell University’s School of Nursing and Public Health, and Natalie Pedri, a senior in the department of Nursing, to talk about how Kathleen’s class helped Natalie detect her own cancer and her journey to recovery. Kathleen also discussed her personal journey with breast cancer and the role she has played as a mentor and friend to Natalie.

11/28/17 #2088

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Welcome back to One on One. I'm Joanna Gagis, sitting in for Steve Adubato right now. I'm joined by two folks from Caldwell University. First, Doctor Kathleen Kelley, who's the Associate Professor and Assistant Director at the School of Nursing and Public Health at Caldwell University, and Natalie Pedri, who is a Senior in the Nursing Department, also at Caldwell. Welcome both of you. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. Beyond the terrific work that you're both doing in the nursing program, there's a really really powerful, personal story here. Natalie, I'm going to start with you. You were in your junior year at Caldwell, applying some of the techniques that you had learned from Doctor Kelley, and in the program... and had a really powerful, personal discovery. Tell us about it. Yeah. So I had Doctor Kelley my junior year in the fall, she was my professor for health assessment. And in that class, we learned all about how to assess ourselves. Just... What does that mean? Assess yourself? To... well when you have a... when you're a nurse, and you have a patient, you have to assess them, what... like listening to their hearts, checking their lungs, and also feeling around their bodies to make sure that they don't have anything abnormal going on. So I was completing a self assessment, my Summer before entering my senior year, and I found something in my abdomen. And it was... it felt very large, and I didn't think that it felt right. So I had... actually had an email from Doctor Kelley sitting in my inbox, and it was like, "Hey Natalie, you missed your assignment." But I was thinking about... I just missed it because I had so much going on, and like, I was thinking about like, what this could be. So this was consuming your mind? You felt something? Yes. You were concerned by it, it started consuming you, did you think it could be something? But what did you think it was? I had no idea. I was googling stuff, as anybody would do... Usually not a good idea, right? No, it's not a good idea! You find the worst prognosis. So by that time... by that time I had, like, ten different cancers, and... Right. ...a bunch of other diseases. So I... So what did you do? What did you discover? I actually answered Doctor Kelley. I was like, "Hey, can you give me a call?" And she's..."