What brought you to the field of survivorship?
I had been working in Digital Marketing at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for about a year when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. One of the many benefits of my job at Dana-Farber was getting the chance to interview and interact with current and former patients. One of those patients was Hil Moss, founder and CEO of OncoveryCare, who I had the pleasure of interviewing through her own breast cancer treatment at Dana-Farber. We stayed in touch, became Instagram supporters of one another, and when she reached out to me about OncoveryCare, I couldn’t jump fast enough at the opportunity to be part of something so incredible.
What excites you most about the future of survivorship?
Despite undergoing treatment and being declared in remission, one of the things that I often talk about with my care team and therapist (even almost 4 years later) is the lack of support I feel in the post-cancer adjustment back to my “normal life” after treatment. As a young adult survivor, many other young adult patients that I have had the chance to befriend all struggle with the same lack of support. Being part of OncoveryCare is not only exciting, but it gives me hope that cancer patients in the future will get the chance to have a comprehensive, concise, and tailored survivorship experience and never have to feel the helplessness that so many survivors experience following their own treatment as they try to navigate their emergence into life after treatment.
What’s the best of being part of the OncoveryCare team?
For me, I love that there are so many wonderful people of all different backgrounds working here. Some are survivors themselves, some work directly with patients, some are physicians, some work in mental health, others in coding and development. This is the first time I’ve ever been part of a company where you can feel everyone’s excitement about the future of the business and are so motivated by the work we’re doing, it’s all very exciting to me.
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I always wanted to work with people and kids in some capacity. For a long time, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. In high school, my summer job was working as a teacher's helper for the daycare that my brother and I attended as babies/toddlers. It was such a fun, exhaustive experience that made me appreciate teachers in an entirely new way, but later motivated me to change my major to communications. I figured that way, I could still work with people but people who could actually communicate a little bit more clearly, ha!
What’s your favorite way to spend a Sunday morning?
I wish I was someone who could sleep in, but the latest I sleep on weekends is usually around 8. At that point, my husband Luke and I like to walk to get coffee, jaunt around the neighborhood, and then make a big breakfast. I’ll curl up on the couch with my kindle and read, or put a romantic comedy on and just laze around. If I’m feeling really motivated, I’ll put a sauce on in the morning to simmer all day and then serve it up with some pasta for a perfect end to a cozy, relaxing day.
