Called to Care: Dr. Jessica Scerbo on What It Really Means to Treat Children With Cancer

We often see doctors as larger-than-life figures. Brilliant, unshakable, the people we turn to when everything feels out of control. But behind every white coat is a person who chose this path for a reason. Someone who has carried grief home, found unexpected joy in the hardest rooms, and been changed by the patients they set out to help.

Called to Care is a series where CURE sits down with doctors to hear their stories, not the credentials. The moments that made them. Why they started. What they carry. Who they hope to be remembered as.

We begin with Dr. Jessica Scerbo, a pediatric oncologist at Hackensack Meridian K. Hovnanian Children's Hospital at Jersey Shore University Medical Center who works with children fighting cancer. She talks about the boy who first drew her to this field, the prayer cards she keeps in her pocket, and why, more often than not, it's the families who end up lifting her team.

What first inspired you to become an oncologist?

For Scerbo, the answer traces back to a single patient, a boy she met during her pediatric rotation who was being treated for neuroblastoma, a cancer that develops in the nerve tissue. "It was taking care of him in that experience that it really just spoke to me," she says. "And I knew that it was where I needed to go."

That moment, a medical student beside the bed of a sick child set the course for everything that followed. She went on to specialize in pediatric oncology, a field that demands not just clinical skill but an extraordinary capacity to sit with uncertainty, fear, and families at their most vulnerable.

Can you remember the moment medicine became more than a career and felt like a calling?

There is a saying in pediatric oncology, Scerbo explains: if you've seen a child fight cancer, it will change your life forever. She believes it completely. "So many of my patients have continued to surprise me with their bravery and resilience, despite their age," she says, "and it really inspires us as a team to continue to do better."

But it is what she does in the losses that says the most. Scerbo keeps the prayer cards of patients who did not survive, carrying them with her each day as a reminder of why the work matters. "Even in the defeats, even in the losses, I use them every day as that inspiration to get back in there, keep trying," she says. "So that we can continue to make those advances."

It is a quiet, personal ritual in a field often measured by data and outcomes. And it speaks to how she moves through this work, not at a distance, but close. Present. Accountable to the patients she has lost as much as the ones she is still fighting for.

What's the hardest thing you've had to carry home from this job?

For all the inspiration her patients give her, this work also carries a weight that does not go away at the end of the day. The hardest moments, Scerbo says, are not always what you might expect. It is not the losses themselves, it is what comes just before. "The hardest thing is when we have to tell a family that there's nothing further that we can do," she says. As healers, the goal is always to have an answer, to say things can be made better. When that is no longer true, the conversation becomes almost unbearable, not just for the family, but for the team. "Oftentimes we are not ready to give up," she says. "And so sometimes it's even harder for us to know to refrain, to pull back, and to let them be comfortable for the remainder of their time."

There is a particular kind of grief in that, the grief of stopping. Of reaching the limit of what medicine can do and having to say so out loud, to people who are not ready to hear it, when you are not ready to say it.

How has caring for people through their most difficult moments changed you as a person?

Scerbo does not have to think long about this one. "It's all about perspective," she says. At the end of a long day, when her husband who works in banking , comes home saying he had a terrible day, her response is blunt: "You have no idea what your day could be like."

Working this close to illness and loss has a way of reordering what matters. She lives each day knowing how quickly things can change. "Don't sweat the small stuff," she says. "Focus on your family, focus on your health, because at any time that can change, and we're all too aware of that." It sounds less like a coping strategy and more like a worldview, forged over years of sitting with families in their worst moments.

When your career is over, what do you hope your patients remember about you?

She does not mention a cure. She does not mention a survival rate or a clinical breakthrough. What Scerbo wants to be remembered for is something simpler, and in many ways more profound. "I hope they remember that I was there to uplift them," she says, the jokes, the laughter, the effort to make an impossible experience just a little bit easier. "While we couldn't change their journey, we were there to support them throughout it."

More than anything, she hopes to be remembered as a welcoming presence. Someone who helped in a tough time. In a field defined by science, that is a deeply human answer, and maybe that is exactly the point.

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