In honor of Pat Decator
Pat Decator was living in Colorado Springs in the early 1980s when she got the urge to become a nurse. “I just wanted to help people,” she says. “I just needed to contribute.” She knew that hospitals around the country needed nurses. So she dove right in, graduating from Beth-El School of Nursing and beginning her oncology nursing career at a hospital in San Antonio, TX, before moving across the country to Pittsburgh, PA. It was there she met her husband Larry, who, when they met, was trying to rewire speakers so his sister, a leukemia patient, could hear the television better. Pat told him he couldn’t do that, but she’d help him find a hospital room with better speakers.
Larry must have been impressed. For Pat, she was just doing her job.
“You do what you have to do to make things right for the patient.”
In 1997, the couple moved to Pittsboro, NC, and Pat spent twelve years caring for patients in the Gravely Building before the move into the N.C. Cancer Hospital.
In 2008, Pat received an Oncology Nursing Excellence Award, which surprised her so much that she cried.
“We don’t do this job to be recognized,” she says. “The job is all about the patients. But it’s a fun job. It’s challenging. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”