AUSTIN, Texas — Sometimes people find their calling through life’s biggest challenges. That was the case for one nurse at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center.
Jennifer Smith works in the bone marrow transplant unit. She doesn’t share her story often, but she has a special connection to her patients and their families.
“I know the things they are thinking. I know the things they're worried about. I know the questions that they're not asking,” she said. “The ones they really want the answer to, but don't feel comfortable going there.”
She knows these things because she has spent time in these hospital rooms, before ever having the title of nurse.
“Walking into this place for me, as your place of employment, you know, where you work, not the place I get treated, is weird,” said Ryan Smith, Jennifer Smith’s husband.
The exact unit where Jennifer Smith now works is where her husband was treated for leukemia and received a lifesaving bone marrow transplant back in 2016.
Smith Family Photos
“It came out of nowhere,” Ryan Smith said of his cancer diagnosis. “I was on a business trip to Montreal, actually, and got off the plane and something wasn't right. I went to the ER, went to the hospital, and the next day they said it was cancer and that I needed to have a bone marrow transplant.”
He said looking back is hard because it is now something that is in the past. He is now cancer-free and his wife is helping others in similar situations.
At the time of her husband's diagnosis, Jennifer Smith was a stay-at-home mom with their three children. But she found a love for health care and science when she was helping care for her husband and she knew she wanted to help others. She started nursing school the same year he received his transplant.
“Dr. Ramakrishnan, even at that time, was saying, ‘You're going to end up being a nurse, aren't you?’ Because she dove into it,” Ryan Smith said.
It was a calling that came through the hardest of times. Jennifer Smith is back in that same hospital, in the same unit, answering that call with a heart full of purpose.
“It really does feel good to not only have made it through – that's the biggest thing is that we got through this time – but also to feel like, you know, we're giving back to other people that are going through the same experience,” she said. “It's kind of come full circle.”
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