Cancer free, Dawn Lovelace relates her experience

Support of CMC hasn’t wavered

 

Last updated 8/10/2018 at 12:35am



Dawn Lovelace had none of the risk factors for breast cancer. She got it anyway.

“I’m a woman … that’s my risk factor,” she said in a recent interview.

The nurse and midwife, who basically founded the obstetrics program at Coulee Medical Center 23 years ago, took her own medical advice and went in to CMC for a screening mammogram in January of 2017.

“Unreality,” she said of the news. “The sinking in was very hard.”

By the following September, Lovelace had had four surgeries.

“I’m fine. I’m cancer free,” she said in July.

She decided to “embrace the ‘going flat’ movement,” she said, choosing to live without any prosthesis, but a still-necessary reconstructive surgery ultimately resulted in complications.

Lovelace, who earned a doctorate in nursing several years ago, travels in her current job as part of the faculty for Frontier Nursing University, the institution where she gained her own midwifery education.

Shortly after her mammogram at CMC, she was on a plane for a remote area of Alaska to check on a program and student progress there. Just because you get sick doesn’t mean you can stop working.

Now, more than a year and a half after the last surgery, she still has some discomfort but has regained her full range of motion. (Yoga and, once strong enough, kayaking helped the most with that.)

But another health calamity hit. Lovelace’s husband, Alan Cain, needed a quadruple bypass surgery in January of this year.

That, she said, on top of everything else, led her to finally resign her position at CMC, where she still saw patients one day per week.

Lovelace said she’d been bothered by rumors that she had left because of some disagreement with the hospital. That’s not true, she said.

“I very much am in support of what the hospital is doing,” she said, noting especially CMC’s push for obstetrics support in this rural area. “The work that they’re trying to do with the tribes now is very important to me.”

Lovelace said that when she originally came to the area in 1994, she came because it was important to her that people in rural areas have access to care.

Coulee Medical Center, she noted, is working closely with other beginning regional entities to forge ties that make that possible, including the Colville Tribes.

After her own experience from the other side of the system, she said, “Boy, I get how important it is.”

 

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