NEW YORK — Jessica Malloy helps to care for and comfort cancer patients at Staten Island University Hospital. 

"That's OK, I understand," she said to a patient the day we were there — and she really does.

The oncology nurse has worked in the outpatient chemotherapy ward for four years. Last summer, however, the tables were turned when Malloy also became a patient.

What You Need To Know

  • Jessica Malloy has been an oncology nurse at Staten Island University Hospital for the last four years

  • Last summer, she was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer, transforming her from caretaker to patient

  • She worked through five months of chemo, which she did with her patients at SIUH, only stopping to recover from a double mastectomy

  • She's back at work, in remission, and with a new appreciation for her patients, and her job

“I got diagnosed with breast cancer, which was really scary,” Malloy recalled.

She worked through five months of chemotherapy, taking time off only to recover from a double mastectomy. 

Instead of hiding her stage three diagnosis from patients, she embraced it. She got her chemo here, felt woozy here, and lost here hair here, while helping to treat patients.

She said, for the first time, she truly understood what it was like to be one of them.

"That saying — you don’t know until you walk in someone’s shoes — really really hit me. And that's one thing that still gets me when I sat and got that diagnosis. I was just sitting there half paying attention and then floating away thinking that my patients have to do this, how do they do this if they don’t even have a little bit of knowledge?” she said.

Despite fears about COVID, Malloy said she couldn't imagine not returning to work, adding that her experience made her an even better nurse than she was before.

She's been back at work since July. 

Now, she asks her patients if they experience any of the dizziness she felt when she had chemo, and questions whether they need their doses slowed down, like she did.

Her voice is a quiet comfort and distraction for patients like Osvaldo, who was recently diagnosed with a rare skin cancer.

“How old (are your grandkids)?,” she asked. “10 and 4,” he replied. “Oh, they’re big, too!” 

Her work, she said, has become more personal: it's helping her patients, but it's helping her to heal, too. 

She's in remission, but knows her battle isn't over.

"Some days I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to help every single person I see,’ and then other days I’m like, ‘Oh man, I don’t know.’ You know, the mental aspect of this gets really draining sometimes. So sometimes I just have to take a deep breath and say, you know, don’t let other people see you, like, having a bad day or whatever, and then sometimes I’m like whatever,” Malloy explained. “This is what it is; this is what cancer is." 

It’s a feeling her patients on the other side of the chair can understand.

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