It’s the day before she’s set to receive a pin for 40 years of service in the Baptist Memorial Hospital system, and Wanda Dent has the day off.

She’s got a 24-year-old patient starting chemotherapy today. A 65-year-old is getting a mastectomy, and she’s waiting on a 34-year-old to call her back to decide if she will take chemotherapy before or after her surgery. She will make phone calls, hold hands, and print out reports to prepare her patients for the fight ahead. 

When she starts her official 12-hour work day as Women’s Health Navigator for Baptist Memorial Hospital of North Mississippi she’ll come in the early morning and check her patients for the day, a list she puts together a week in advance. She’ll drop in for chemotherapy appointments, doctor check-ups, and consultations. 

Dent started her career more than four decades ago caring for patients in their youngest days in the neonatal intensive care unit, and labor and delivery. She’s worked in recovery rooms, as a head nurse, and as a director of nursing. In 2004 she came from Columbus to Oxford, commuting from Tupelo and staying sometimes four nights a week in an apartment on Van Buren, to be the nursing educator at Baptist.

She was inspired to transfer to the cancer care center after her annual mammogram came back with an abnormal calcification in 2014, and she was led through her breast cancer treatment by a nurse navigator.

“Having it myself has really taught me so much about the feelings that you go through when you hear that diagnosis,” she said. “The fears, the anxiety, the confusion. I do think it makes me a better navigator to my precious patients.”

Her primary responsibility is to assess and educate her patients about are barriers to them getting their treatments like transportation, family or financial issues, cultural beliefs. Dent’s first introduction to her wards comes when a mammogram or scan comes back abnormal. She will begin their relationship by talking them through the biopsy process.

She will watch for pathology results, then contact the physicians and nurse practitioners to set up care options. When the time comes for surgery she drops by for a visit if possible, but always calls or sends a message, watching still for more pathological reports that will determine the length and intensity of further treatment. She is there for the first oncology visit, the first radiation oncology visit and routine checkups throughout treatment. She puts a name on the illness ravaging their bodies, often diagramming and mapping out just where the mass is and how to reach it.

This was how she crossed paths with Sarah Smith, an x-ray technician, mother, and now breast cancer survivor.  “I can tell her anything,” Smith said of her nurse navigator.

She was first diagnosed in 2014 with Ductal carcinoma in situ or DCIS, and again in 2016 when she found a new lump in the shower after returning from a trip to the Sugar Bowl with her family.  She came to lean firmly on her husband, 7-year-old son Sterling, and her navigator.

“We started chemo, and the first six treatments were pretty tough big drugs,” she said, “Then we did radiation in September of 2016, every day for 33 days, 7 minutes on the table before work, and then I went back to work.” 

She said she would often take chemo treatments on Thursdays and return to her job as an x-ray technician at University Sports Medicine on Mondays. 

“I had chemo and then I had this anxiety; am I about to run to the bathroom, am I going to throw up? Am I going to have these little aliens in my head?” she said, “I didn’t know how it was going to treat me.”

She said Dent was there to walk her through the double mastectomy, chemotherapy, normal and abnormal side effects, hair loss, and eventually remission. 

Smith is just one of more than a hundred patients that Dent oversees, and one of the 252,710 cases of breast cancer diagnosed every year according to a representative of the American Cancer Society.

Dent, who also oversees the free mammogram program and manages the assistance funds from Susan G. Komen, the C.A.R.E. Walk, says that breast cancer is the leading cancer being treated at Baptist. The ACA recognizes breast cancer as the second leading cause of cancer death in women, behind only lung cancer. 

Early detection with risk reduction is the key to being cured of breast cancer;  factors like age, family history, alcohol usage, hormone therapy and sedentary lifestyles can increase chances in all women. 

However, the American Cancer Society recently changed their policy on mammogram frequency from starting at age 40 to starting at age 45 and getting annual scans until the age of 54. Guidelines from most physician organizations such as the American Society of Breast Cancer Surgeons and the National Comprehensive Cancer guidelines still recommend that all women over the age of 40 get annual breast cancer exams. 

Dent and Smith can both attest that proactivity in scanning can be life-saving. Both women would not have been scanned under the ACS’s new recommendation at the time of their diagnoses.

Smith says her apprehension about family history saved her life when she had an early mammogram at the age of 36. “I have some friends who say ‘My insurance doesn’t cover it until I’m 40’, but I look at them and think, what’s the cost of a mammogram to you?Worth seeing your child grow?“ she said.

Dent, who was diagnosed at the age of 56, continued to have annual mammograms after the age of 54, noting that skipping a year could have cost her her life.

“I had my mammogram every year without fail and I had a perfect mammogram in 2013 and my mammogram in 2014 showed a small abnormal microcalcification,” Dent explained. She now advocates for regular breast examinations for all women with any family history or increased risk factors. 

In the month of October, she typically has breast cancer awareness speaking engagements with more than 20 groups, but this year has taken only five or six speaking engagements. After returning from a mission trip to Cuba on November 1, she will retire after 44 years in the nursing profession and countless lives touched.

“It seems like there is something every day,” she said. “A kind word or a thank you or just seeing a patient relax or helping educate them so they can make a good decision by participating in their care.”

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