Treating patients with care

by Jessica Sabbath

To Mary Cross Johnson, her patients become family.

As a radiation therapist in a North Carolina cancer center, she is charged with administering radiation treatments. Patients often undergo several treatments a week for six to eight weeks, so Mary gets to know them well.

“Our patients are kind of like family,” she says. “We joke around with them. We ask them about their families, anything we can do to get their minds off what they’re going through.”

Mary says patients often will return several years later to update their radiation therapists on how they’re doing. “I love our patients,” says Mary. “We have some of the best patients. They’re just so appreciative.”

The toughest part of her job is treating terminally ill patients, where the goal of the radiation therapy is to ease pain rather than cure the disease.

Mary always knew she wanted a career in the healthcare field, so she decided to take healthcare classes at Pittsylvania Career and Technical Center in high school.
“Our teacher taught us how important good patient care was,” says Mary. “If you’re in the healthcare field, your main focus needs to be patient care, and she instilled that into us.”

After graduating from high school Mary went into a two-year radiological program, which focuses on reading X-rays. During clinical rotations in the second year of the program, she became interested in radiation oncology. “I observed radiation oncology, and I immediately fell in love with it,” says Mary.

She earned a certificate in radiation therapy from Pitt Community College in North Carolina so she could pursue her dream.

Mary wants to continue in radiation therapy, learning new technology to provide the best patient care possible. “I couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” she says.

Caring for others

by Veronica Garabelli

Cindya Umaña Amador, PT, DPT, knew she wanted to go into the medical field, but it was a high school physical therapy and sports medicine class that guided her to physical therapy.

“This class really kind of opened up my eyes, and I was like ‘Oh, OK, this is something. I can see myself doing this,’” she says about the class she took sophomore year.

Today, Cindya is a licensed physical therapist for Fox Rehabilitation, a private practice that includes physical, occupational, and speech therapists. She makes house calls and helps senior patients improve their movement and manage their pain. That can mean working on balance by playing catch with a patient or helping them walk with or without a cane. Her favorite part of her job is tailoring treatments to individual patients, while the most challenging is dealing with ageism.

“Everyone says ‘Oh, he’s 80. He shouldn’t be able to do that anymore,’ but sometimes age is just a number,” says Cindya, who also is contracted as a physical therapist at Spring Arbor of Leesburg, an assisted-living facility.

Cindya’s ultimate career goal is to become a geriatric specialist, which she says is the highest standard in her specialty.

She advises high school students who want to become physical therapists to volunteer and travel to expose themselves to the different areas of physical therapy.

Physical therapy has various special-ties, including helping children, injured athletes, and animals. While working on her doctorate, for example, Cindya did mission work in Costa Rica, providing physical therapy in communities and orphanages. Although the work-load and cases were overwhelming at times, “it improved my ability to adapt to diverse situations while being able to problem solve,” she says.