When Shekinah Elmore started medical school in 2010, she approached it with a mindset uncharacteristic of most first-year students: To do her best, and if her best wasn’t good enough, then that was okay.
“I think the overachiever types who often go to med school are very afraid of failure,” she shares. “And I think I was much more afraid of not giving it whatever I had, that failing would have been just a testament to the fact that I really wanted to try.”
Just two weeks before orientation began at Harvard University, Elmore underwent her last surgery from a double-cancer diagnosis: She had both breast and lung cancer. And she was far from done with recovery. In between classes, she attended her remaining chemotherapy appointments. Over winter break, she had breast reconstruction surgery.
While her oncologist advised her to put medical school on hold for a year, Elmore felt like she had waited long enough to get started — and her cancer diagnoses only pushed her onward.
“It’s definitely not a plan I’d recommend,” she says with a laugh. “It’s just this was a thing that worked for me.”
Now a radiation oncologist at UNC-Chapel Hill, Elmore focuses on individualized care for her patients and strives to help them figure out how to fit that care into their lives. “The medical part is almost the easier part,” she admits. “We have big studies. We have lots of good research. We know exactly what to do. The harder part is tailoring and individualizing care so that it meets the rest of what you need in your life.”
Read more about Shekinah Elmore–a member of the cancer leadership team for UNC Project Malawi and an assistant professor in the Departments of Radiation Oncology and Urology–and her path to radiation oncology.