Katie Sherrouse, CRNP

“I’m Katie Sherrouse. I’m a nurse practitioner here at Southern Cancer Center and I’ve been here since 2020. I have a husband, a kid and two dogs, and we spend a lot of time gardening. We have a little mini farm situation going on. We’re waiting for some eggs to hatch right now.

If you would have asked me when I started doing medicine if I was going to end up in oncology, I would have laughed hysterically. I started my nursing career doing med surg, so just literally everything, and I thought I was going to wind up in cardiology. But there was just something about the oncology patients I kept encountering that just kept drawing me in.

When I decided to leave the job that I was in, I was looking for jobs everywhere. There was this position in an oncology unit here in Huntsville and I’ve been here ever since. I just found a home here and something about it, something about the patients, something about just being in this field altogether is so exciting. It has its really, really hard moments, but getting to help other people walk gracefully through those moments as well is something that I’m just passionate about.

Everything about this job is so unique. I’m excited to see what each day brings because it’s never the same. You look at our list of diagnoses and it’s just the same thing after the same thing after the same thing, but there’s always something new happening.

I think the main thing is to remember that this is a journey. My job as a nurse practitioner is not to make someone do something or force anyone into anything. I provide them with opportunities and I say ‘hey, there’s this knowledge set that I know about and you don’t necessarily, so let me give you this information, let me walk beside you as you make choices’. But at the end of the day, we’re partners in everything that we do.

The thing that excites me the most is when someone gets to go home. That’s absolutely the best thing. It means one of two things. One – they’ve gotten better and so they’re ready to keep going with treatment, they’re ready to keep pushing. Or two – it means they have decided that they’re done with treatment and instead of pushing as hard as they can to keep going as long as they can, they’ve said ‘I’m going to take a step back, I’m gonna spend the time I have left with my family’. And I think both of those things are just absolute major wins.”