SAN DIEGO — Remarkable Women finalist Jennifer Palmer is a registered nurse who turned a personal tragedy into a way to help others during their fight with cancer.
“You have cancer”: Palmer helped many patients who have heard these three words over the years, but one day, those words were whispered to her.
“They told me I was going to have to go through chemotherapy, they said I was going to go bald,” Palmer said. “The loss of control and the fear of going bald was terrifying for me, so I wanted to do everything that I could to try to change that.”
So she went to work, faced her fears and started using all her medical knowledge to find a way to keep her from losing her hair.
“It’s cryotherapy so it will slow down if not completely stop the passing of the chemotherapeutic agents across that membrane that will go into your hair follicles so that your hairline will not be affected by the chemotherapy,” Palmer said. “It will be three months next week since I’ve had my last chemotherapy. I lost all my other hair — these are not my real eyebrows, these are not my real eyelashes — but this is my real hair.”
But Palmer says this wasn’t just for her. Her job as a nurse is to take care of people, and she wanted to share her creation with others who were in the same fight as her. So she started KeepYourHairWithChemo.com.
“As a nurse, I try super hard to do everything I can to help people,” Palmer said. “And so when I got sick and I was losing that control for myself, I had to do everything I could — not necessarily just for myself but for other people.”
