Nurse of the Week: Montana Brown, Childhood Cancer Survivor, Returns to Hospital as Nurse 20 Years Later

Our Nurse of the Week is 24-year-old Montana Brown, a two-time childhood cancer survivor who recently began working as a nurse at the same hospital where she was treated. After being diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma at two years old, a rare type of childhood cancer of the connective tissue, Brown underwent a year of chemotherapy at the AFLAC Cancer Center in Atlanta, GA. Now she is working there as a staff nurse.

Brown’s parents encouraged her to have a normal life. After actively competing in gymnastics and cheerleading for years, Brown found out she had cancer again at 15 years old. She tells ABCNews.Go.com:

“I had just tried out for my high school cheerleading team. I actually ran a mile while I had cancer and had no idea…There weren’t symptoms but my mom and dad could tell that something was different about me and they knew that something was a little off.”

After being diagnosed for the second time, Brown went to the AFLAC Cancer Center every week for chemotherapy and radiation treatments. She also learned that she would have to stop gymnastics and cheerleading. However, the experience allowed her to realize a new calling. Brown decided that she wanted to become a nurse.

“The nurses here, as great as they were when I was 2 – from what my mom says – they were extremely loving and caring and compassionate. And, just the love they showed me and my family in our time of need just really helped me. It helped me want to become as kind and as caring and as compassionate as they were for me,” Brown recalled in an interview with ABCNews.Go.com.

After her encounters as a toddler battling cancer, and later as a high school student, pushed Brown to pursue a career in nursing, she went to nursing school specifically wanting to work in pediatric oncology. Now she is working as a nurse at the AFLAC Cancer Center where her dreams have come full circle. She hopes to be a source of hope and inspiration for children battling cancer in the same place where she became a survivor.