Tammy Zinn on Replacing Fear With Hope in Oncology Nursing

In an interview with CURE, oncology nurse Tammy Zinn discussed the personal experience that shaped her nearly 30-year career, the programs she has helped launch for patients with cancer, and what she believes makes oncology nursing meaningful. Zinn is the director of clinical support services at Lee Health Cancer Institute in Fort Myers, Florida.

Zinn, a finalist for the Extraordinary Healer Award, spoke about why she focuses on replacing fear with hope in everyday cancer care, the importance of emotional and psychosocial support alongside medical treatment, and her work helping launch Emma's Wish, a program that grants meaningful experiences to patients with advanced breast cancer. She also discussed the Cancer Support Community at Lee Health Cancer Institute and the advice she would give to oncology nurses hoping to make a lasting difference.

The conversation has been edited for clarity.

CURE: Would you please first just introduce yourself and give us some background?

Zinn: My name is Tammy Zinn. I'm the director of clinical support services at Lee Health Cancer Institute in Fort Myers, Florida. I have been an oncology nurse for almost 30 years, always done oncology nursing.

What inspired you to dedicate your career to oncology nursing?

My inspiration for oncology nursing, and the path that I took, started as a personal journey when I was 17. My mother was diagnosed with head and neck cancer, and when you're 17, you have no idea what that means or what that journey is going to look like. From 17 to 20, we went through diagnosis, surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, not a lot of support. You really don't know what you're up against. The nurses that took care of my mother also took care of our family and helped us through that journey. They helped us through the diagnosis, the treatment, and eventually the end of her life, and helped us transition through every stage out of that experience. The love and the compassion that I received, my family received, from these teams of nurses, from the inpatient to the office to hospice care, that's what guided me and gave me the inspiration, and I knew at that point I was always meant to be a caregiver, and that started my path.

What does being named an Extraordinary Healer finalist mean to you personally?

It's really humbling, because I feel like we're all extraordinary healers in one way or another. Just being able to have the privilege to come into someone's life at a time when they're most vulnerable means a lot. So for someone to call me an extraordinary healer, I don't think I'm any more special than any of the other nurses or colleagues that I've worked with, but it's exciting, it's very exciting.

What was it like when you first got that call that you were selected as a finalist for the award?

I was called on my birthday, and I wasn't in the office that day because we rescued a dog and we were at the vet. My friend called me and said, "Have you not gotten a special phone call for your birthday?" I said, "No, I'm off today." She said, "Have you got any kind of calls?" And I said, "Well, I am getting calls, why are you hounding me?" basically is my thought. And she said, "Return those phone calls. I need you to return those phone calls." There was a call from CURE, and I was thinking, oh, CURE magazine is calling, they're probably calling because they want Lee Health Cancer Institute to do something with the magazine for our clinical support services. So I called back, and yes, I was very surprised when I was told that I had been nominated, and then that I was selected as a finalist. It brought tears to my eyes, honestly, that someone thought enough to write that nomination.

Your work focuses heavily on replacing fear with hope. What does that look like in everyday cancer care?

Hope is what gets the patient through. It also gets the clinician through too. You have to have hope that there's something ahead for that patient, their caregiver, and even the survivors that come out on the other end. You want patients to be able to have the hope that there is going to be more time, there is a better treatment, hope that they're going to be able to share this journey with their family and not put burdens on their family. Cancer care is so complex that once you're given that diagnosis, the patients hear the word that they have cancer, and all hope just stops right there. They're scared to death, and they don't know what to do. So as a clinician, bringing hope up front is what's going to help them get through the journey.

Why is emotional and social support just as important as medical treatment for patients with cancer and their families?

Emotional support and psychosocial support is so important for cancer patients, their family members, survivors, because I think that we do really well as a clinical society bringing good cancer care. There's great medications, there's great treatment out there, and we're so focused on curing that cancer that we forget about the patient that's right in the center. When the patient leaves that infusion chair or that hospital bed and they go home, they're lost. They have all this noise in their head. So I think that emotional care and psychosocial support is so important, to bring it back to putting the patient in the center to help them get through this journey.

You helped launch Emma's Wish to support patients with breast cancer and their loved ones. What has it been like seeing those wishes come true?

Emma's Wish is an amazing program, and it is dedicated for women and men that are diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, stage four breast cancers. What it does is it gives the patient a way to make a memory for themselves, for their caregivers, for their loved ones, whatever that memory wants to look like. These patients are looking at the end of their journey, and they want something meaningful for their families, and that's what Emma's Wish does. It brings families together, it makes the memories for them, and that memory can be whatever the patient wants it to be. It can be a simple trip, it can be a big celebratory party where they bring people together, photo sessions for the family, memories that last a long time. One of our great memories was a stage four breast cancer patient who had a daughter living in Puerto Rico. The daughter had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and the patient had no way to get to see her daughter; she hadn't seen her daughter in five years. Emma's Wish made that possible. Her wish was to be able to go be with her daughter and connect them together at that time. We've granted over 22 wishes for Emma's Wish patients. One of the important things about it is that we're so focused on paying for the cancer treatment and how we're going to pay our bills outside of this, so when these patients want to make a memory, Emma's Wish takes that financial burden off the table. It's a full-fledged paid vacation, trip, or memory, whatever it wants to look like for that patient, and the cost is 100% taken care of. It's made possible through a relationship between Lee Health Cancer Institute and the COVID Foundation, which aligned together to bring this special program to patients.

The Cancer Support Community at Lee Health Cancer Institute has already impacted so many people. What gap in care were you hoping to fill with that program?

Cancer Support Community is phenomenal. It puts the patient in the center. It helps them find wholeness. It connects them with a community of like-minded people that are going through the same journey. It takes care of psychosocial support, and that looks like so many different things. It brings them together to make friends and family with each other, it puts them in specialized support groups where they're free to talk about it and not keep any guard up, and that's really healing for the patient. It offers art therapy, because psychosocial therapy comes across in many ways, through art, through music, through exercise and meditation, and Cancer Support Community offers that to all cancer patients, caregivers, and survivors. It's great that you've made it to the end of treatment, but it's really hard on survivors too, because they're thinking, well, what if, and what now. Cancer Support Community takes that patient through the whole journey. It meets them where they are at any point in their journey, and it's 100% free, which is wonderful for these patients because it removes that financial burden. The tagline for Cancer Support Community is that community is stronger than cancer, and that's what we want them to feel, that presence and that connection.

How would you describe oncology nursing in three words?

Courage, advocacy, and being authentic, authenticity.

What advice would you give to an oncology nurse who wants to make a lasting difference in patients' lives?

First, be true to yourself. You need to find your inner strength, what's going to carry you through. Do self-care. Nurses from my generation never do self-care, but you have to take care of yourself to be able to take care of people through the long haul. Oncology nursing is very hard, it's emotionally taxing and draining, but the rewards that come out on the other end are amazing.

What do you hope patients and caregivers feel after interacting with you or your team?

I want them to be inspired, I want them to have courage, hope, most of all, and know that they're not alone in this journey.

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