The Cupertino Courier

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Cancer doesn't stop doctoral research

By Cody Kraatz

Lori Rodriguez almost died a year ago. Now, she has bounced back into the life that breast cancer so rudely interrupted.

Rodriguez is earning a Ph.D. at UC-San Francisco with a dissertation focused on how nursing educators handle mistakes and errors with nursing students. Her paper is bolstered by research gathered during her time on the Carnegie Foundation National Nursing Education study, which studies nine nursing colleges.

"Lori is one of those amazing people who, despite adversity, has maintained her efforts to get this research off the ground. I think what we've done is sort of support her at every level," said Dorrie Fontaine, R.N., Ph.D., the overseer of the Betty Irene Moore Fellowships that Rodriguez has received to fund her studies. Fellows get $180,000 over three years.

"It's not unusual to have a student have some disruption," said Fontaine. "What is unusual is that they stay on the timeline."

Rodriguez was diagnosed with breast cancer in late January 2006 and had a mastectomy to remove her left breast that February. The cancer had spread to her lymph nodes, which accelerates the development of tumors.

"There are a lot of women now who catch it before then. I don't think I'm as bad off as Elizabeth Edwards, but I'm not as fortunate as Sheryl Crow," said Rodriguez, referring to presidential candidate John Edwards' wife and the Grammy Award-winning musician.

In April 2006, Rodriguez started chemotherapy, participating in an ongoing clinical trial to determine the most effective combination of drugs to fight cancer.

Rodriguez, whose husband Jim has a law practice near the Cupertino Library, spends hours each day at her computer in her Cupertino home office writing about professionals being more open about their mistakes and about why mistakes are underreported. She says she never gets writer's block, tending to overwrite and then having to edit intensely.

Her doctors praise her dedication to regular exercise. She started going to the Living Strong Living Well Program at the YMCA in September.

"Those people, both my classmates and the instructors of the Living Strong Living Well class, were so sensitive to the needs of patients. They were fabulous," Rodriguez said. They let her do the first class of aerobics sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, some of them telling her they had been in that same position and assured her she would get better.

And she has. She now tries to exercise five days a week, doing some exercise such as walking her dog Amy, swimming laps in her pool at home or doing weights and cardio classes at the YMCA. She has come a long way from the depths of her pain after surgeries.

"There were times when I couldn't even move; it was so painful," said Rodriguez, who took morphine for months after a surgery last June to correct a ruptured bowel. The dangerous complication was caused by her chemotherapy treatment and could easily have killed her.

"They didn't give me much of a chance of survival because the chemo wipes out your ability to fight infection. There was a great likelihood I wouldn't make it through."

Her experience in the medical field and her research did not help her confidence, but she had a lot of friends in the profession to guide her through and advocate for her.

"Being immersed in research about errors and mistakes made me very wary, cautious, alert. If my friends weren't with me, I was hypervigilant," she said.

Rodriguez also had a lot of support from her family, especially her daughter Alison, 28, who has a bachelor's degree in psychology and is studying nursing at Villanova University. She wants to work with new parents and their babies.

"My daughter was unbelievable," says Rodriguez. "Once people got me out of the acute phase, she just took on whatever I needed. With the things she learned about pain and suffering, she's way beyond me at this point."

Rodriguez is also in a support group with former El Camino Hospital workers who have had breast cancer. She knew some of them when she worked there.

"When you get breast cancer, it seems like everybody has breast cancer," says Rodriguez, who links breast cancer rates to hormone therapy.

She points to a recent, well-publicized study that was shut down early when scientists saw the very strong correlation between estrogen therapy treatments for menopause and breast cancer. Women in their 50s and 60s who used estrogen during menopause, such as Rodriguez, saw their chances of breast cancer go from one in nine to one in seven, she said.

Estrogen therapy is much less common now. She is continuing a five-year regimen of an estrogen-blocking drug because the tumor she had thrived on estrogen, and says meat is another source of potentially cancer-supporting hormones. She also had her right breast removed as a precaution against a recurrence of cancer. Cancer cells have a five-year life span.

Rodriguez is going back to teaching at San Jose State University starting in the fall, where she will teach newer students and some who are finishing up their apprenticeships. She will be part of a growing regimen in nursing education known as peripheral apprenticeship. Students start with little responsibility and take on more and more.

Rodriguez said it's important that faculty teach students to take responsibility for their mistakes, that nurses share their mistakes and that the industry create new ways to report and study error in nursing schools.

"In the context of learning, they are not labeled mistakes. They're labeled as learning experiences," she said, adding that mistakes are thus vastly underreported.

Rodriguez points out that her studies open up into other professions as well. Mistakes are everywhere and are inevitable. She is trying to work towards a way to recognize them and use them more effectively.