Celebrating her calling: Coaldale woman’s cancer fight led her to nursing

As a nurse at a VA hospital near Philadelphia, Judy Veron has the job she was born to do.

The Coaldale resident is the daughter of a nurse and a naval veteran, but the connection goes deeper than that.

Each day at work, she gets to do something she loves: providing veterans with the care that they need to lead more enjoyable lives. And as a 10-year breast cancer survivor, she can relate to what her patients are experiencing.

“She’s always treated her patients with care. Even when she was taking care of prisoners. She was the nurse at the prison for a while and she treated them with dignity, too,” said Jeanine Veron Snyder, Veron’s daughter.

Veron, who turns 60 today, may have never found her dream job if she hadn’t received her cancer diagnosis.

For many years, she was known as “the mail lady” at the Carbon County Courthouse. She also worked as a nurses’ aide at local nursing homes.

But after her breast cancer diagnosis in 2009, chemotherapy, radiation and a double mastectomy, Veron decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a licensed nurse.

It was something she always wanted to do. But it took the adversity of battling cancer to inspire her to take the first step.

“I had the best job in the county, but nursing was, I just couldn’t deny that, that’s where I needed to be,” she said.

This week Veron has much to celebrate. Her birthday today falls right in the middle of national nurses’ week. This weekend, she’ll celebrate Mother’s Day with husband Joe, her three children, Justin, Jeanine and Julia, and the family’s seven grandchildren.

Fighting spirit

Veron has inspired her family with her focus on helping others. That nurturing spirit never faltered, even as she faced down a deadly disease.

In 2008, one of Veron’s lifelong best friends convinced her to get a mammogram. After an exam from Dr. David Borhi, and more testing, she got a diagnosis she never expected — stage 3 breast cancer.

Up until that time, Veron never thought she could get breast cancer. She had breast-fed her children, and there was no family history of the disease. She knew that other women got it, but thought she never would.

Most people would have been understandably devastated, but Veron trusted her doctors, and focused on what she could do to beat the disease.

“I don’t know if it’s my personality, but I just, I think a lot of people when they’re faced with something they just do what they have to do,” she said.

Two surgeons — general surgeon Dr. Michael Martinez and plastic surgeon Dr. W. Michael Morrissey — collaborated to perform her double mastectomy and reconstruction on the same day, right in Lehighton at what is today St. Luke’s Gnaden Huetten Campus.

As she was going in for surgery, her daughter Julia, who was still in high school, told her that she was pregnant.

She continued to work through chemotherapy and radiation, staying late after work so she could have a longer lunch break to drive back and forth to her appointments. Even when side effects like chemo brain drained her and dulled her mind, she continued work.

Veron has seen all of her grandchildren being born. But on the day Julia went into labor, Veron had a radiation appointment. She asked her daughter to wait to have the baby until she got back.

“And son of a gun, she did. I got back from treatment and an hour or so later, he was born,” she said.

Nurturer

For Veron’s oldest daughter, Jeanine Veron Snyder, it was shocking to hear that her mom had cancer. But Judy Veron stayed focused on the positive — so much that her kids didn’t really know how serious her diagnosis was.

“She was so upbeat and positive, it was just like a normal day to her. (When she said) ‘I had to go to chemo’ it was kind of like ‘I need to go get my nails done,’ ” Jeanine said.

Veron’s spirit was so strong that you wouldn’t have been able to tell she was battling the disease, except for the fact that she had no hair.

In fact, losing her hair was Veron’s main fear during her battle. So when that fear became real, the family decided to embrace it. In one day, they shaved the heads of Veron and her grandsons — who thought it was very entertaining.

“The boys shaved their hair too just to make her feel better. I’ll never forget that we did that,” Snyder said.

After completing radiation in 2009, Veron was found to have no evidence of the disease. She continues to use that term to describe her status today.

“We don’t say cancer free, we say ‘no evidence of disease’ which is equal to or better than cancer-free,” she said.

A new calling

Not long after completing her treatment, Veron decided she wanted to pursue a lifelong dream: becoming a licensed nurse. She was inspired by her chemo brain and the entire ordeal.

She joined a brand-new program at Penn State Hazleton, attending nursing school on nights and weekends while continuing to work. Her entrance exams took place the day after a revision surgery, but she worked through the pain.

As a nursing student, Veron settled for nothing less than the best. When she got a B, she was unsatisfied.

Julia, the youngest daughter, who is also a licensed nurse, has a greater appreciation for the effort her mom put in to not only complete nursing school, but excelling while recovering from her cancer battle.

Continuing the fight

During her studies, Judy applied for and was granted the Florence Nightingale Scholarship, which is given to only one LPN student in the state of Pennsylvania each year — out of thousands.

Even though she had no evidence of cancer, Veron didn’t want to stop battling the disease. She enrolled in clinical trials in North Carolina, for using the hormone blocker tamoxifen.

It turned out that for Veron, the drug was not the best form of treatment. But she’s happy that she was able to provide information which could help future breast cancer patients.

She’s also a passionate advocate for breast cancer awareness. She volunteers to help with online resources like www.breastcancertrials.org, and www.mybcteam.com. She loves to go to events like the Pink Light walk to listen to other survivors and share her story. She reminds women and men to get checked.

She still takes a chemotherapy pill each day, which she hopes will stop in 2020. But she still won’t say that she is cancer-free.

Judy is a hero to her family. But even self-motivated, inspirational people like her have heroes. Veron said she is inspired by the veterans she works with every day.

“I’m a proud VA nurse. It’s such an honor to work with the veterans,” she said.