As BSC celebrates The Year of the Ginkgo – the 65^th anniversary of the planting of our signature ginkgo trees – we’ve selected a word of the month that captures a key part of the BSC experience. November’s word is Resilience.

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Diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia during her senior year of high school, Emily Kyzer Browne ’00 uses what she learned from her experience in her career as a pediatric oncology nurse practitioner at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. As a survivor, she feels called to support the needs of children with similar diagnoses.

“When I applied to Birmingham-Southern, an education major was my designated track,” Browne says. “But then, as my medical treatment progressed, the nurse practitioners who cared for me made such an impact. My mom asked me, ‘Don’t you want to do something in medicine? You’d be really good at that. You like science.’”

Browne finished chemotherapy in April 1998, close to the end of her sophomore year. After graduating from BSC with a biology degree, Browne earned a Master of Science in nursing from Vanderbilt University in 2002 and a Doctor of Nursing Practice from Vanderbilt in 2013.

In honor of her college advisor and biology professor, the late Dr. Jeannette Runquist, Browne endowed a scholarship to BSC. She served as Dr. Runquist’s teaching assistant and as a student mentor for first-year advisees.

“I never had the confidence to pursue these things on my own,” says Browne, “but, because of her, I gained a ton of experience and confidence.”

After completing chemotherapy, Browne was considered cured, with a low chance of recurrence after five years. She recognizes her good fortune, recalling a time in college when she learned that one of her friends had passed away from the same disease.

“I walked out of my dorm room and looked around and thought, ‘I don’t know who to talk to about this, because I don’t feel like anybody around me is going to necessarily understand.’ Of course, my friends were supportive. It’s just that it takes a different level to understand this kind of thing, and how it personally affected me.”

It was a formative time for Browne — navigating new college experiences as a cancer patient and survivor. Browne’s current position as director of the Transition Oncology Program at St. Jude allows her to support others navigating a similar transition from patient to survivor. One common misconception about the end of treatment is that it’s an exciting and happy time.

“It is for sure — you’ve gone through a lot, and you survived,” she says. “It’s fantastic to be done with the weekly visits to the clinic and the chemotherapy and the side effects from medication, but it is also often a very scary time. It can be anxiety-provoking, because you feel like this safety net has been removed. You’re not checking your labs as often. You’re not on that medicine that was keeping things at bay, and so in this phase, with every little sniffle and cough and bruise, you start to think, oh, no, has it come back?”

She says that, for survivors, everything has changed since the initial diagnosis.

“The biggest thing that we do for families is provide anticipatory guidance. Here’s how you might feel; here’s what you might experience; and really just trying to normalize that and prepare families for that transition. Otherwise, the patient and their family might feel like they’re in a black hole where no one really understands what’s going on. Friends and family might be relieved that it’s all over. They see the patient appearing to be healthier and feel like there’s nothing to worry about, but the survivor is always worried about disease recurrence, and about long-term side effects which may not even appear for months to years later.”

The program includes making sure that, as children return to school and regular activities, their teachers will understand and know how to be supportive.

“It’s a phase of treatment that’s not really been well studied. We know a lot about the actual treatment itself, and we know a lot about the physical aspects of our long-term survivors of childhood cancer, but we don’t know a lot about what happens emotionally and socially in those first few years off therapy. That’s not been studied as well, so we’re hoping to change that.”

Thoughts on Courage

Hear Emily Kyzer Browne’s speech on courage from 100 Minutes on the Hilltop in 2018.