Meet Me Monday
Who: Sandra Brown
Age: 59
Position: LMH volunteer, part-time assistant at Woodmen Community Center
Family: Husband James; children, Kenisha Brown, Omar Fisher; granddaughter, Amaris
Life challenges: Breast cancer survivor, congestive heart failure
Anyone who meets up with Sandra Brown before having surgery at Lenoir Memorial Hospital can rest assured she will be there to ease those pre-surgery fears.
Brown, the daughter of the late Henry and Tempy Fisher of Kinston, has been a volunteer in the day surgery department since December 2009. But it isn’t simply her experience as a volunteer that makes her stand out — it’s the personal challenges she has faced and continues to face, one of which was being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996.
“I’m a breast cancer survivor,” she said. But that simply led to more problems.
Brown was told by her doctor the type of chemotherapy she had could cause her to have congestive heart failure in about 10 years. In 2006, that’s exactly what happened. Two years later, she had to have a pacemaker inserted.
“It changed (life) dramatically,” she said.
Even though she had taken care of her mother who had quadruple heart bypass surgery until her death in 1994, that was not the same as experiencing a life-threatening heart disease herself, she said.
Brown was working as a regional loss prevention district trainer for Kmart and had just returned from Orlando, Fla., where she had received special certification. She happened to have an annual checkup scheduled and that’s when she found out her heart was not doing well.
“That’s when I started having a lot of problems,” she said. “Depression set in. Thoughts of harming myself set in. … I was in a very low point in my life. I just felt I had actually been dealt a bad hand.”
But then she began cardiac rehabilitation three days a week and eventually worked her way up to walking two to three miles.
“It took one year before I could walk a mile,” she said. “Now I can walk a mile in 12 minutes.”
She weighs herself every day to make sure that fluid isn’t building up around her heart. She keeps her salt intake in check, and said she feels “great.”
“I like to exercise,” she said, “because exercise helps me. Once I go, I feel better.”
Brown was always a busy person, so nearly four years ago she saw an ad saying there was a need for volunteers in the hospital’s cancer center. She took a tour, but noticed it wasn’t as busy as she would like. She decided to work in day surgery.
“In December, it was really busy,” she said, “and I just decided I wanted to stay there.”
When people come for their preoperative care, Brown makes sure they get registered, communicates with family members and makes sure they have pagers, runs errands and transfers patient information — or what she calls the “moo numbers” because the record numbers start with MOO.
She’s also the person to ease the family members’ fears while the patient is undergoing surgery.
When volunteers are sick or have a death in the family, Brown sends them cards. She’s the one who conducts the flag-lowering ceremony when a volunteer dies, and puts together a dedication of valor with a framed photo of the volunteer and the uniform smock, which stands in the hallway to the right inside the main doors of LMH.
“I decided to volunteer because I wanted to give back to the community,” she said.
Brown also works part-time at the Woodman Community Center, and she became an ordained minister at her church, Integrity Ministries in Kinston, where her brother Ernest Fisher is pastor.
She meets people of all ages by volunteering and in her ministry.
“If I can just reach one or save one,” Brown said, “I feel my job is done. That’s why I love to give so much back. God has done so much for me. I’d like to give back to him.”
Brown’s next volunteering addition to her busy schedule is to assist the hospital chaplain.
Margaret Fisher can be reached at 252-559-1082 or Margaret.Fisher@Kinston.com. Follow her on Twitter @MargaretFishr.