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www.HartfordBusiness.com December 7, 2015 • Hartford Business Journal 23 HEALTH CARE HEROES 2015 Scheinblum provides care, comfort to cancer patients By David Medina Special to the Hartford Business Journal Y ou've been diagnosed with cancer. Potentially terminal or not, your family members are overcome with grief and having a hard time keeping it together. You pray that the chemotherapy treatments you have accepted put the can- cer in remission and that the person assigned to administer the drug is sensitive to your medical and emotional needs. In walks oncology nurse Elaine Scheinblum and your prayers are answered. Scheinblum does more than dispense chemotherapy at the Women's Infusion Center in the Smilow Cancer Hospi- tal at Yale New Haven on the campus of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford. It's part of her job to counsel patients and their families to look at their situation as a "bump in the road," something they have to get past and move on with in their lives, rather than dwell on it as an illness. She even goes so far as to hand out prayer shawls and religious medals to patients in need of extra spiritual support. She is also known as having the sharpest of eyes for evalu- ating the physical effects of the chemotherapy treatment on her patients. Moreover, her knowledge of the treatment far exceeds that of her colleagues, making her a most ideal per- son to manage a patient's care. "It's not just about giving drugs," Scheinblum said. "You have to get to know the patients as individuals. A lot of what we do is about putting patients in a positive frame of mind." Schleinblum became interested in nursing as a young girl, while babysitting for a doctor and his nurse/wife, who gave her the confidence to pursue nursing as a career. She earned a three-year diploma from the St. Vincent Hospital School of Nursing in Worcester, Mass. After securing a position tend- ing to post-operative patients at St. Francis, she obtained her bachelor's degree in nursing from the University of Hartford and recently returned there for her master's degree in nurs- ing education. "I've been doing this [nursing] for 34 years," said Schein- blum, who has worked at St. Francis' cancer center for 21 of those years and can't put a number on the thousands of patients she has cared for in that time. "When I started, che- motherapy was administered differently. Today we are into targeted-therapy regimens that have increased our ability to give patients longer lives. A lot of the drugs that were experi- mental when I started, are standard therapies now." The most fulfilling moments of her job occur when a patient she has cared for — especially a patient who was diagnosed with stage 3 or stage 4 cancer — goes into remission and the disease can no longer be detected on a CAT scan. Many of those patients, she says, have become lifelong friends. Scheinblum's supervisor, oncologist Susan Rabinowe, said Scheinblum's love of learning is the catalyst for her exceptional skills at taking care of patients. "When I met her in 1994, I knew that she was an amazing person," Rabinowe said. "The knowledge base that she had about chemotherapy was far more advanced than that of a typical nurse." In addition to Scheinblum's keen instinct for detect- ing when a patient is not tolerating medication, Rabinowe explained, she has been a key participant in desensitizing patients who have had allergic reactions to chemotherapy. She has also mastered the skill of administering intraperito- neal chemotherapy, a time-intensive abdominal procedure for women with ovarian cancer. "It's critical to have someone like that on your team," Rabinowe said. "Our other nurses are wonderful but she shines in particular because of all of these characteristics that she has." Scheinblum is at a loss to explain what it is that drives her. "It's just something that I was born to do and I can't imagine doing anything else," she says. n P H O T O | C O N T R I B U T E D Elaine Scheinblum said the most fulfilling moments of her job occur when a patient she has cared for — especially a patient who was diagnosed with stage 3 or stage 4 cancer — goes into remission and the disease can no longer be detected on a CAT scan. Elaine Scheinblum Registered nurse St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center Category Winner: Nurse " " It's not just about giving drugs. You have to get to know the patients as individuals. A lot of what we do is about putting patients in a positive frame of mind.