I have been a pharmacist for over 40 years with the last 27 spent as an oncology pharmacist. When I started out in Pharmacy I worked 14-15 years in hospital pharmacy. I worked and became a registered pharmacist in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. I married my husband, a pediatrician, in the early 1980’s. I have two well educated children that give us that “House Divided” every football and basketball season. Our son is a graduate from OU and our daughter is a graduate from UT-Austin. We have two Welsh Pembroke Corgis named Hank and Miss Beulah, for all of you “Hank the Cow Dog” fans.

My exposure to oncology pharmacy was minimal, as back in the hospital days of the 1970’s we didn’t have a lot of chemotherapy agents to utilize. What we did have as meds were pretty lethal. If the cancer didn’t kill you, the drugs we had sure made you contemplate which was worse. As I moved from hospital pharmacy to oncology clinical pharmacy, I was fortunate to time it right in the early 90’s. This was an era of new ideas and medications. These were game changers in the treatment of cancer. The background in organic, biochemistry, physiology, and organic medicinal chemistry (which I swore would be of no use once I graduated pharmacy school), became my “rod and staff”.

I used those courses to help understand the mechanism of action of these new drugs. I used this in turn to help my patients understand how these agents would benefit their quality of life. With the new millennium and the advent of immunotherapy in oncology treatment, another new era is evolving to keep cancer at bay. Learning in this field never stops and it is a continual challenge, but very rewarding.