The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare

Meg welcomes Nancy G. Brinker, the founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure and The Promise Fund of Florida. Nancy was also United States Ambassador to Hungary from 2001 to 2003 and Chief of Protocol of the United States from 2007 to the end of the George W. Bush administration. 

Nancy walks us through her personal experience with her sister Suzy's battle with breast cancer and how that great loss inspired her to dedicate her life to fighting the disease, creating Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Meg and Nancy discuss Nancy’s current work with the Promise Fund of Florida, a nonprofit dedicated to improving access to breast and cervical cancer screenings. She explains her restlessness and desire for faster progress, leading her to create a new model of care that focuses on early detection and treatment for underserved populations. Nancy highlights the importance of patient navigators and partnerships with federally qualified healthcare centers in providing comprehensive care.
 
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Episode Credits: 

The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare is a production of The Krinsky Company. 
Hosted by Meg Escobosa. 
Produced by Meg Escobosa, Calvin Marty, Chelsea Ho, Medina Sabic, Markala Comfort, and Wendy Nielsen.
Edited, engineered, and mixed by Calvin Marty. 
All music composed and performed by Calvin Marty. 

©2024 The Krinsky Company

Creators & Guests

Host
Meg Escobosa
Meg Escobosa has 15 years of innovation consulting experience, focusing on the unique challenges of healthcare since 2012. For The Krinsky Company, Meg leads client engagements overseeing advisory board design, creation and management. She also leads industry research, expert recruitment and trend analysis to support corporate innovation initiatives centered on the future of healthcare. Her background in innovation and strategy consulting began at IdeaScope Associates where she was involved all aspects of strategic innovation initiatives including understanding the voice of the customer, industry research and aligning the executive team to invest in promising strategic growth opportunities. Meg received her BA in Latin American Studies from Trinity College in Hartford and her MBA in sustainable management from the pioneering Master’s degree program, Presidio Graduate School. She is also on the board of a non-profit foundation focused on researching and developing technology to support a sustainable society. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two teenage daughters.
Producer
Calvin Marty
A man of many hats, Calvin Marty is a Podcast Producer, Editor, Engineer, Voice Actor, Actor, Composer, Singer/Songwriter, Musician, and Tennis Enthusiast. Calvin produces, engineers, edits, mixes, and scores The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare. Calvin is also the creator of the 2020 podcast, irRegular People, among others. Find his music under the names Calvin Marty, Billy Dubbs, Nature Show, and The Sunken Ship. Over his long career as an actor, Calvin's has voiced many Radio and TV commercials for a wide-range of companies and products and has appeared in small on-camera roles on shows such as Chicago Fire and Empire.

What is The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare?

The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare is a podcast featuring exceptional women making an impact in healthcare today. We celebrate our guests’ accomplishments, setbacks, and the lessons they've learned throughout their careers. We dig into the many healthcare issues we face today and how these innovative leaders are working to solve them. Join host Meg Escobosa in conversation with some of the many brilliant, courageous women on the front lines of the future of health.

Nancy Brinker: We had some of the top scientists in America who helped us. We had a lot of wonderful things going our way and had funded a tremendous amount of research. However, it was probably about 10 years ago that I looked at myself one day in the mirror and I said, “You know, this is gonna be almost your 40th year doing this.”

What's gnawing inside of me? What is it that's making me very restless? I felt we weren't doing everything we could do. We were so busy doing events, raising all that money, giving it to scientists. It was working beautifully, but I wanted to go faster. I wanted to apply what we knew, and I said, “I cannot go at the current level that I'm going at unless I can feel that we're making tremendous gains in populations with disparities.”

Meg Escobosa: Welcome to the Game-Changing Women of Healthcare, featuring exceptional women making an impact in healthcare today. Together we dig into the many healthcare issues we face today and how these innovative leaders are working to solve them. We celebrate our guests’ accomplishments, setbacks, and the lessons they've learned throughout their careers.

I'm Meg Escobosa. Join me in conversation with some of the many brilliant and courageous women on the front lines of the future of health.

Welcome back to The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare. I'm your host, Meg Escobosa. A quick note before we get into today's episode, we are currently looking for sponsors for the podcast. If supporting and encouraging female leadership in healthcare is important to you or your organization, help us do that by becoming a sponsor of the Game-Changing Women of Healthcare, reach our engaged audience with a mention by me in future episodes, or we'll produce a short audio spot for your organization. At the Krinsky Company, we believe in female and diverse leadership in healthcare. If that's important to you too, become a sponsor of the podcast and proudly share your values with the world. Reach out to us at podcast@thekrinskyco.com and thank you.

Today on the show, we're joined by Nancy Brinker, who's the former Chief of Protocol for the United States, former Ambassador to Hungary, and the founder of Susan G. Komen, created an honor of her sister Susie. Susan G. Komen has raised $1.1 billion in breast cancer research since 1982, enabling more women to survive and thrive after their diagnosis.

And if that isn't enough, today, Nancy is currently working on a new nonprofit, the Promise Fund of Florida. Founded in Palm Beach County, dedicated to improving access to life-saving breast and cervical cancer screenings. Nancy, welcome to the show.

Nancy Brinker: Thank you so much, Meg. It's great to be back visiting with you again.

Meg Escobosa: We're thrilled to have you. Really, it is an honor. I mean, as I said in the opening, you know, you've accomplished so much already, but here you are back at it, creating something new. You've had, really, an incredible career and we could probably just do an entire show or series on the work you've accomplished and the learnings you've had.

I mean, I say that sincerely, but let's focus first on what you're doing right now, what you're working on and the Promise Fund of Florida. Yeah. Why did you create it and what is your mission and what are you doing?

Nancy Brinker: Many people have asked me, why have I left Susan Kome.
The truth of the matter is I never will leave it because it's a story of my sister. It's a story of breast cancer, it's a story of cancer.

And this was built as a tribute to my sister Susie, who in 1980 died of a very serious breast cancer, which was practically stage four when she was diagnosed. And my family and I were living at the time in Peoria Illinois, where I was born.

It was after I graduated from the University of Illinois and I was just about ready and was in the middle of moving to Dallas, Texas to my first job, which was marketing and training, etc., at a very popular organization and store called Neiman Marcus, and I was so lucky to work for one of the founders and learned so much about salesmanship, about marketing, about getting people understanding what people need and how you can fit the need and you might, what did that have to do with, with breast cancer? But it had a lot to do as the years went on.

First of all, when Susie had called me the first time to tell me she had breast cancer, I hurried to get home and be with her. And when we, as I said, “discovered it,” was already stage four and we're able to get into MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. There were only maybe eight or nine cancer centers in 1978 that would take you. There really weren't that many oncologists in the United States to treat cancer, so we were able to get her there and I rushed to her side and reluctantly she was never really excited about going to the doctor, but she was very cognizant of healthcare and how important it was and unfortunately, after two and a half years of extremely aggressive therapy, just a month or two before her birthday, August 4th, 1980, she died.

Meg Escobosa: How old would she have been?

Nancy Brinker: She was 36 years old and she was beautiful. She was the homecoming queen of our high school.

She was loved by her friends. She just finished a few years before her time at the University of Missouri and I think it was one of the most chilling calls I ever had in my lifetime though, when she called me to come and be with her as she would be looking for a treatment center. First, we went to one and they gave her some, hormones to take, which sometimes they would do or not, or take them away.

And then they did, they removed her ovaries because they believed that she had had an estrogen-driven breast cancer because remember again, in those days, yeah, we knew nothing about chemistry or anything, but I went back to Texas. She wanted me to go back and get to work after her first, after this experience, and was praying that she would be okay.

Well, she wasn't. And about a year later I was able, through some friends in Texas, to get her admitted to MD Anderson, which was then one of the few breast cancer centers in the United States. We were all pretty sure she would have to have chemotherapy, which was very new then on the scene.

But, she was brave and we went down there, my mother and I with her, and it was a very difficult course of treatment and in those days they had just a few formulations of drugs that they were giving patients with what they thought was advanced breast cancer.

She would be treated and then she would come home and stay about three weeks and then come back and as she lost all of her hair and felt very sick and all the side effects, which in those days they didn't have the antiemetics right, that you could use. Nonetheless, she faced it bravely. She loved her oncologist Dr. George Blumenschein, who's now deceased, but she, you know, grew to have friends everywhere.

We had a wonderful patient navigator. That was the first time I ever saw a navigator, not a nurse, but a navigator who showed us all around, who stayed with her, who became her friend, and was the person she could communicate with if mother or me, if we couldn't go back for a particular treatment anyway, it didn't regress, and as Suzy was being treated, we would go in there and they would always seat us in a place where we would have one of the next appointments.

And one day we were sitting there and Suzy looked up, and I'll never forget this, a big clock on the wall, and I always was staring at it with her so I could see how many minutes would need to go by before she was done with the treatment. On the floor, on the hallways. Looking either way from the clinic, people were sitting closely, I mean, jammed in together.

Some of them from foreign countries, waiting to be treated. And some of them had to wait hours and hours and hours and sometimes even overnight so they could see a doctor the next day. And Suzy looked at me on that particular visit and she says, you know what, Nan, where a woman lives, shouldn't matter whether they live. Whether she lives, it just shouldn't matter. Yeah. And I'm - this is bothering me. I mean, I'm getting treatment. I come here, I don't feel well, certainly after the treatment, but none of these ladies are gonna be seen for a very long time, probably. And I feel badly about it. So. She said, “You know, when we get done with this,” she always used to say, “When I get better, I want you to promise me that you will help me with this.”

And I said, of course I will. And she said, “I want to make sure everybody gets the same treatment and that we will all be well.” Well, that really wasn't what it was meant to be months later. She was very ill, very deep into this disease on her last visit there, I can remember so well. Right before we were going to leave on the plane and Susie was reclining in a sofa and she looked at me and she says, “You know, Nan, I need you to promise me that you will work till the end of your life to make sure that women don't have to do this. I don't want any woman to feel as badly as I do,” and she says, “You know what? We've gotta find a way. You've gotta find a way - how to make sure everybody has access. Everybody can be treated the same way because this is a disease that requires a tremendous amount of thinking. Look at how hard the doctors are working and they're not having a lot of success.”

She wasn't dumb. She could look around her and see the patients she never saw again, and so I promised her I would, that I would do that. And if it took the rest of my life, I would do it. Well, it has taken the rest of my life after a very sad funeral, I'll never forget, I sat down in a chair and I thought, “I know what this means. This means that I have to get to work immediately and figure out what I promised.”

In the meantime, I was going to get married and I was beginning a new life, but I was very grateful. I was moving to Dallas, Texas because there were so many people there. That I knew I could go to at least ask if they knew what this disease was, ask them what they felt. Were they as upset as I was? And you know what? We gathered an incredible group of women who were. One of them being Laura Bush because she and the president at the time were living in Texas. The other one that people might remember is Senator Kay Hutchison from Texas. And she was one of the other first people, well-known, and many, many other women who were just outstanding because they all knew this disease was growing, spreading, and they all had a fear of it. Everybody was fearful of this. And you couldn't use the word “breast” in public. You couldn't talk about it - radio, tv, newspaper. So I didn't know beyond this, how in the heck were we gonna create an organization where you couldn't even talk about it?

So we sent our invitations out for the Susan G. Komen organization for, you know, to fight breast cancer. And that in itself was a big problem because we knew, and there were a lot of, at the time, husbands whose wives were on our committee and they didn't wanna go to the event. They felt awkward about it.. They didn't believe that, that it was the right thing to talk about in public. And that was a real barrier.

My vision was that if we had enough people who are already in the business of informing others and, sometimes very difficult subjects, we could have an organization where we would be raising money and then we would be able to give it to the scientists who I'd met so many of, when I was at MD Anderson and then I met at other organizations.

We had people who were committed. We stood to see the first mammogram machine that was mobile and, and then we also, at that same time, at an event we had had at one of the local big shopping centers, I would try out an idea that I had, which was creating an organization that was built on maybe sports or activity, or it looked proactive that women would do.

That was great, except our committee, at the time said to me, a couple of the] girls were really angry and they said, “You're gonna, you're gonna destroy the great work we've done. People are afraid they're not just gonna come and do some event because you want them to. They can't even say the words breast cancer.”

Anyway, I said, “Give me a chance, please.” So the day came and we were able to offer a very special guest, a place there, First Lady Betty Ford, and she came to our luncheon event, which was to be followed by the Race for the Cure. And she couldn't have been a better person to carry this forward.

First lady that had this disease openly has done in her lifetime a tremendous amount to take the fear away or the shame away.

So we started the Susan Komen Foundation that way with a lot of volunteers, and then we built the Race for the Cure into the largest women's sporting event that way. And the Race for the Cure ultimately was done on one level or another in well over 100 cities around the United States and outside of the country, Israel, Italy and different places like that, and they all created awareness and we were off to the races.

[music break]

So about 40 years later, we had some of the top scientists in America who helped us on our scientific review committee. We had a lot of wonderful things going our way and had funded a tremendous amount of research. However, it was probably about 10 years ago that I looked at myself one day in the mirror and I said, “You know, this is gonna be your, almost your 40th year doing this.”

What's gnawing inside of me? What is, what is it that's making me very restless? I felt we weren't doing everything we could do. In other words, we were so busy doing events, raising all that money, giving it to scientists. It was working beautifully, but I wanted to go faster. I really did. I wanted to apply what we knew, and I said, “I cannot go at the current level that I'm going at unless I can feel that we're making tremendous gains in populations with disparities” because many people were not getting any treatment. And it bothered me and I thought, “How can we get such, you know, on one side the best drugs in the world for our patients and the knowledge, the growing knowledge of the disease and what worked and what didn't, and seeing an awful lot of women lived through it.”

So I decided to take what is, I think, the last part of my life and do this because I wanted to create a model, a new model of not just activity, but a new model of how we could get the treatment, the thinking, everything about breast cancer, to patients faster and have better outcomes and results, particularly in women with disparities.

When I had moved then to Florida, I live in Palm Beach County, which is the third largest county in the third largest state of our country, with one of the dimmest in a way, numbers of breast cancer and patients and how they present or don't, and awareness of it. Only to find out that we had a very, very substandard healthcare system in the county I live in.

So I thought, now how can I go from this highly developed world we have of funding science, millions and millions of dollars of it. And we come here and I came to find out that there were 80 - 100,000 women in this county who have no healthcare because ost of the hospitals were for-profit institutions that couldn't take or do charity care.

And it was devastating to me to see that that was, you know, it was so central to my sister's wishes, and then I walk right into it. That's not to say we don't have good physicians. It's our healthcare system is not organized to help people with preventive care or early, early detection, because now we know that when you find this disease, in most women very early, it is 90 to 95% curable.

That's a piece that really drove me into creating the Promise Fund. So my two best friends here, and they're really brilliant, a lot smarter than I am, insisted that I do something about it. And I said, “well, what am I supposed to do?” And they said, “Fix it. Fix it. “

Meg Escobosa: Come on Nancy.

Nancy Brinker: Not that I ever thought I did do enough, but so okay. And I did and spent a lot of time, we brought a young man down here from Brandeis University in their social welfare school, or the curricula he was taking on to map our whole community and find out where women could be treated, where they would not be able to get care. How we get people into screening, diagnosis and treatment as fast as possible and deal with their social determinants because we knew most of these women were from lower resourced part of our community. And that's what happened. That was in 2018. Six years later, almost six years later, here's what we've done.

We decided to partner with the federally qualified healthcare system here, named Found Care, that's the name of this system. There are about 1400 of these. Institutions. I love them. I call them institutions, but they're really primary healthcare centers around the country. Some of them have six or eight different entities under their roof with them so that they can see and give primary care to most women.

Well, to diagnose a disease like breast cancer or cervical cancer, which we moved in doing, you really can't do it if you don't go to the doctor, because if you don't have a primary physician, that's usually where these diseases where we begin to predict them and try to prevent the disease or in some way get them into treatment.

And then we looked at the whole community and the whole landscape and I said to the group, “Listen. We've got to find a place to partner with where we can bring patients. We need to, today, find as many patient navigators as we can, hire them and have them be the point person because so many of these women were underserved, 80 - 100,000 had never really been treated by a regular primary physician.

Meg Escobosa: And can you help us understand what is a patient navigator?

Nancy Brinker: Yeah. Patient Navigator is someone between a social worker and a nurse. If you could mix up a drink and you'd say half social worker, half nurse, it would be good. The women, in fact, tonight we're doing our Christmas party for our wonderful patient navigators. We have 19 of them now. They are truly like angels. I say that because most of the patients that we have served and so far in that time, we have served, engaged, educated, screened, or only in a hundred small cases, gotten them treated very early for very early breast cancer. Almost 25,000 women so far.

You can imagine a woman who has rarely had any healthcare when she can walk into a clinic. The Found care clinic, which are now our solid partners where we have the Promise Fund clinic and they are introduced to their navigator and this now becomes the key to them beating this disease, or at least, you know, getting their hands around it and understanding if they have it. They understand how to befriend, how to keep a woman in this context, feeling good.

What has been the miraculous thing is that for the first time, these women have a medical home, what we call a medical home. They know that if they're having something they think doesn't feel right or that they have an appointment, that the navigator takes care of everything, she will often drive them to the appointment, or we will have rides that Uber donated to us, or if they're having a problem with food in their household or family issues. Whatever it is, they arrange a service to help take care of what that is. We decided to treat as many social determinants of care as we could. If there was a food problem, we wanted to take care of that. If there was any other kind of job problem, the company they were working for wasn't willing to let them if they needed therapy.

That has made people be able to leap to a new place in their life. Yes. They're not only able to take care of themselves, but when they go to the federally qualified healthcare system, they can bring their husband, they can have all family care. So now they bring their child, they even do dental work. They do things that are amazing, that make their lives better while this is going on.

Meg Escobosa: So the federally qualified healthcare system that is not exclusively for women, it is actually available to men as well, but…

Nancy Brinker: Found carries for everyone. That's the name of the federally Qualified Healthcare Center. Our center is called the Promise Fund Center. And to get that center, we went to a company that I've worked with for 18 or 19 years called Hologic, and they very generously offered us a top-notch piece of mammography equipment where we have screened most of these women. And then we found other sources in the community that would also volunteer to do those kinds of services. We then can figure out how to treat them from then on.

I mentioned Uber and we have other donors who have helped us do things so we're very excited about it. We have ultrasound capacity now.

The greatest thing is being in a federally qualified healthcare center - our patient, let's say her children need vaccinations before they go back to school, her husband needs a checkup. The children need dental work. They do all of that there.

All of a sudden, this is what we have, I do not wake up anymore without a smile on my face. Every day. And that is because I know that these patients not only know where they're going, but they know who they're going with. And it is something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime and I'm just so proud and happy of how our navigators work.

Meg Escobosa: And you’re presenting a solution. You're presenting a model that is a 360 degree kind of solution to capturing people who don't have access to care, helping them get the prevention, avoiding worsening disease. You're really catching them early and providing a resource to the community and setting a model for others.

Nancy Brinker: Exactly. We have gotten three grants from the government, the infrastructure healthcare grants through our congresswomen here. It's just been amazing.

And we are so grateful to our congresswomen: Sonia McCormick, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Lois Hope. Lois is unbelievable. She has done the most incredible work over and over and over. She is an amazing congresswoman herself and she inspired the others to ask with her. We are so thrilled about working with her and her colleagues, and so now we have three replications to go - centers in other counties.

Actually, these. These centers will be in our county because we have a lower county land-wise, right? Some will be in Broward and some will be in different counties. But they're growing quickly and the amount of women we have screened, treated, navigated, have stayed with us and, and it's really a miracle because now if they have anything else they think is wrong or if their child needs, you know, as it grows, it grows and it grows fast. So I feel like all these. Congresswomen should actually be given a prize.

Meg Escobosa: Well, it's true. When you get the support that you need, you know, when the recognition of the work that you're doing is actually making impact and that they recognize it and help to drive resources to you so you can expand and operate at a bigger scale is incredible.

I mean, it infuses your organization to do the next thing. It's almost, you know, it's a mirror to the work you're doing with patients, helping them feel better so that they can be even a better resource in their own communities to their families.

Nancy Brinker: Thank you so much for saying that. You know, Lois Frankel is always available also to nurture and to educate other women in different states or counties because she's a real barn burner, and when she picked the phone up that day, I said, “Congressman Frankel, I, we just all love you. Thank you very much for doing this.”

And what is interesting, and at first it's subtle and then it grows. And you were referring to it in a way. We have created a strength of patient-physician relationships that never existed before. And when you think of it, how many of these women, maybe they went to a doctor or some kind of birther, they have asked, you know what, not gone even to a doctor, didn't even see a doctor until we created the system. So that's what I'm so excited about. because we've broken down barriers, we've broken them down. We're building new highways, streets, avenues for people to have healthcare, not fear it, but be a part of it.

Meg Escobosa: Do you think that this model could be used for other diseases? I mean, do you think, could you envision this serving other chronic diseases?

Nancy Brinker: Absolutely, and that would be, if you asked what long-term goal we would have, that is exactly it because we should be able to be in the position to have, of course, primary care is around all of these diseases you mentioned and giving women, the reason why they they can do that is because they have faith and courage. Now that there is some place they can go and somebody's not gonna laugh at them or say, “Sorry, we can't serve you,” or “Just sit down there, dear, on the floor and we'll be buying a little while,” or sitting in a room somewhere and nobody talks to you for hours can be absolutely frightening. So this is exactly what we have in mind. Right now, the federally qualified healthcare system treats about 70% of people in poverty in our country.

They're just not known, and I said to myself in a funny way, since I'd done several years of government service, served overseas as an ambassador at one time, “If I don't know the answer to these questions, how are they going to know? Where are they gonna go to get the care?” So this to me, has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, is to see the system begin to right size itself around care people need.

Meg Escobosa: Well, I'm also curious how you were able to set up a partnership with them. How did you convince them to, you know, let you come in and help, you know, bring the promise wealth?

Nancy Brinker: Well. There were really two factors. First, we tried to work with the system we have here in our county because we thought not only do we have to go to a place with, you know, where there's primary care, but we need to go to hospitals who will, if there's a problem, if a woman needs a surgery or needs some, we need to have friendships. Well, that wasn't possible because we have mostly for-profit care here. In Palm Beach County, we managed to talk to a lot of people.

There was a time of persuasion that we went through that worked very well because when we showed people really how minimal our needs were gonna be, but how critical they were, we didn't want a patient dump, which a lot of people all in, in situations like ours where they may not have enough Medicaid, Medicare or anything, they'll take a patient to another county or even another state where they know there's a not-for-profit system and dump the patient there. Wow. We said no patient dumping.

By the way, our navigators though they would, at first, this wonderful woman accommodated and traveled with this dear young woman who had pretty serious breast cancer was a five-hour experience just to get to Tampa.

Wow. And then, you know, a turnaround trip a few days later when she didn't feel so good, but at least she was treated. And of course then our dream was to make it all much simpler to find hospitals who, even though they had a different payment model, would agree to a certain finite number of patients. And so far, we've never exceeded that number of patients. So I think people now understand what we're doing.

Meg Escobosa: I'm guessing that the hypothesis is that you're gonna save money down the road. Prevention, that's exactly right, is less expensive to look at these patients, to diagnose early is gonna be less expensive than any of the care that they're gonna need once they get the disease.

Nancy Brinker: You're so right and even people with means, with significant means to be able to pay for some care, these new drugs that have been developed are miracle drugs for breast cancer and some of the, you know, lung cancer and different cancers that kill the most people.

And that's something we live by now. How much glory you would feel if you knew you could predict or prevent a woman from developing this disease? It is genetic with many people. Some it is not. It's not, you know, many women don't have a chip. But when you do, and I happened to be one of those women a few years after my sister died, I too developed breast cancer, and serious breast cancer because it was BRCA positive, which means that it's very common for me to have a lot of skin cancers and different kinds of cancers, but fortunately, we have more treatment now today and more reality, and people understand what it is.

So it just a question of really good diagnosis, and the right kind of follow-up. Then I think we will begin to see the amounts of women, it is the leading cancer killer of women now, and it just breaks my heart when I see that after all these years. I believe there will come a day now if we practice the way we are doing, particularly with lower resource people, who have never been in a hospital before. We will find and, and if we know and predict what can happen to them, we will know a lot faster, a lot better, and have an opportunity to cure a lot more people.

[music break]

Meg Escobosa: When we last spoke, you mentioned Marie Curie as one of your mentors. I love that you have a mentor you've never met, it's really lovely. Can you talk about some other people you've either you've never met that you consider mentors or any other mentors?

Nancy Brinker: I had a lot of them may not have a name of people they know.

Ruth Altshuler, a wonderful woman in Dallas, Texas - her very good friend, Caroline Hunt. There were so many women I can remember who were mentors to me. Mary Lasker, a book was just written about her. Judith Peabody, a wonderful book about Mary Lasker. She was a woman of the sort of turn of, not turn of our century, but she was born, I'm sure, like - my mother was in the twenties, early twenties, but she was a woman who rose to some fame in New York as a woman who was very socially well-placed very wealthy, and she was so disturbed about the lack of research that we were actually getting going in the cancer period. And she would get on a train all the time, go to Washington and she was really one of the first patient advocates ever to put her arms around the disease and go to the federal government to get money to try to, you know, build more philanthropy targeted to medications, to hospitals, to therapies that we never knew before in this country.

She managed to get the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, funded by our government, and she stuck with it. I didn't even get to ever meet Marie Curie. I wish I had a woman with - what a career. She discovered radium and then she managed to transform it into radiation treatment and therapy and everything, and used it liberally when she could, as she trained mostly in France, in the center, one of the medical centers there, but she took that so she was very tired of seeing all these poor soldiers lose their limbs, right, because there was no way to see where the bullet had launched. So she took her little radium and then she had created the first very primitive radiation machine, put it in a car and drove out to the front of the war. Over time, she had borrowed several cars, old model Ts from her friends that were living in Paris, and she said, “Listen, I'll give you your car back. I just need it. We need some, we just need a way to transport some patients. We know we can save their lives. Nothing will happen to your car.” Well, you know, so she gets them, you know, by then she is a full blown ambulance service. Going back and forth, to the front with men who all they were gonna do was amputate their limbs because they were so badly damaged.

When she was able to use her little radium machine, her first radiation, she was able to see how far the ballast had gone in the arm, whether it could be removed. They didn't wanna have to remove body parts. And she was the first person to do that. And these were the last years of her life. She would've probably been my age to do this, and it's always given me terrific feeling that it doesn't matter how old you are, it matters how committed you are because after all, we're all here to make each other feel better, to make mankind stronger, better, more productive, and hopefully live many, many years longer than we do now with productive lives.

Meg Escobosa: That is a really lovely, beautiful thought. Did you ever doubt you could accomplish all that you've accomplished?

Nancy Brinker: Oh yeah. I mean, most of the time I've spent being scared to death in my life because with it all, I actually was kind of a shy person, even though I was very, you know, talkative and not afraid to walk into a room and start talking, but it's brought me so much unexpected joy in my life. We'll never quite get it perfect, but for me to go into a center and see women who are literally of the lowest denominator in our country of income level of having anything in their lives that can make them understand their life could get better because nobody does anything for them. to watch these navigators work with these women.

And I get to talk to, well, I get to talk to some of our patients who have survived beautifully and are so grateful. They'll get tears in their eyes. They're a joy. They're a joy. It's what we're supposed to do when we're on earth. And so that's why, I guess, I hope I get to live a long time. I wanna see what we can do.

I really want it to be so normal and so natural that someday people can figure it out for themselves. Well, we'll go a long way.
You've have a very impressive career.

Meg Escobosa: Thank you.

Nancy Brinker: I'm not the only person in this conversation. What are, what is the most meaningful event you had happen that made you want to do, for example, this podcast?

Meg Escobosa: Oh for me, oh, you’re turning the tables on the host. Gosh, that's amazing. What can I say?

Well, I too, also feel incredibly privileged this, this opportunity to host this show is such a privilege. I feel, you know, that it is, I can't say it was my calling, but it is certainly, it's a fit in terms of my desire to enable people to tell their stories, to showcase what is special and unique about the women in our world, but it's a privilege. I just feel, and I have worked with really incredible women and I also have, so I, I don't have a specific story per se, but we have, what really inspired us was our clients, honestly. We would work with these women who were ambitious like you, who could see beyond where we are today, and said to themselves, “It's never been done. I think we can probably figure this out,” and that kind of was something that I took inspiration from because I would probably be more subdued and you know, be more, “Well, let's really know for sure if we can do this.” You know?And the truth is nothing great ever happens that way.

You really need to take leaps. You really need to trust and learn, but trust and go and, you know, so I feel I am stretching constantly and I'm always inspired by these conversations. So that's where I'm coming from with this.

Nancy Brinker: That is wonderful and I commend you because oftentimes I'll listen to conversations or, you know, be in an airport situation where I'm sitting there and reading and listening to people talk, and it is one of the best ways to learn and observe people and I am so proud that so many women I know now have come forward with things they believe, whether it's women's rights or employment or whatever it is, it's really nice now to see women get very, very involved, whether it's politics or policy or even religious issues where people believe strongly in something. It's just better. It's good to have women's voices at the table.

Meg Escobosa: Yes, absolutely. You know, and even just thinking about how, you know, you have a way of engaging people by saying, you know, “How can you help?” Even just this example you gave of Marie Curie, she needs a car, she's gonna ask for the car.

I mean, it's just that idea of saying like, “We gotta figure this out. We can patchwork something. At least create a model today that we'll then, you know, improve and make better and just collaborate.” I think the notion of you're not gonna do it alone. You can't do it alone, and you shouldn't. So just, I think that's another tendency that I think women bring. I'm not saying that men don't do that because obviously, we collaborate with men, but I just think it's sort of a mindset, a certain attitude of, “Yes, let's get together and talk about it and figure it out.”

Nancy Brinker: And I think you're exactly right. And I think of all the women I've met who have had long careers and a lot of it is because they did reach out, they did reach beyond what they thought their capacity was. And it was almost like a testimony to yourself, “Can I do this? Of course you can do it.” And I think you just, you put your finger on it.

We, Meg, in our country, have the right to, we have the right to assemble, the right to be free speech. We have things. Maybe that's what's made us the most generous people in the world because we believe it is not just a right. It's our duty to take care of our country, for example, and how few people, it bothers me that not enough people are involved.

You know, Sandra Day O'Connor was a friend of mine. I was lucky enough to meet her. She used to preach and not even preach, but her issue was civics that children did not know or get a chance to learn about American history. And when you look all around today, you see it in bright light.

People don't understand how we struggle to have our country. We struggled for people to be wealthy. We made big mistakes. We pushed the only sign of humanity in what was America, them, our Native Americans, we pushed them out of the way, brutally. We, you know, and the things we learn when we, you know, ask a question or volunteer to do something that no one else is doing, it changes the world, even if it's a little part of the world.

So good for you.

Meg Escobosa: You said the last time we spoke, “I'd like to see movements move forward and I can see how this Promise Fund of Florida is really, truly an example of that motivation. And it's very inspiring to see, you know, you could have said, “Let me rest on my laurels. I've made an impact. I have raised funds, I've raised awareness, I have driven research. Wow, look at me,” but no, you've said this is not solved. There's people that need help. I can do something. I know how to bring people together. I know how to push forward and I know what's needed and I can face difficult things. And you've done that and I'm just, I'm excited for what's next.

I'm excited. I know you're gonna, you were thinking about maybe even writing another book.

Nancy Brinker: Yeah, and I think I know the title even I've been thinking about it, rolling it around my head, but it's a lot of what you're saying that is, and to give the other, and just hearing you today, I know people who are your followers gain courage because a lot of what happens is that as women, especially in our generation and maybe, and certainly the ones before, were sometimes belittled or felt as if they were lesser people than they were because of the way society was and how it empowers you when you hear other people's stories like you're doing, I can do that. Why can't I do that? You know?

Meg Escobosa: And you know, as you've even said, it's like it bothers me. This bothers me. Yeah. What can I do about it? What can I do about it? What can I do about it? You know? And that is privilege. I mean, this is true. We have the privilege to look at problems outside of our personal universe. And so that's the privilege we should use. We should say, “How can we solve problems for others?”

Nancy Brinker: So true.

Meg Escobosa: So thank you so much for spending the time with us and sharing your story and your inspiration. I'm thrilled to have you on the show and it's been really a privilege to meet you.

Nancy Brinker: Thank you Meg so much. It's been a pleasure to meet with you and I wish you such good luck and a wonderful journey as you live your dream.

Meg Escobosa: Thank you.

Meg Escobosa: Thanks for joining us for the Game Changing Women of Healthcare, a production of The Krinsky Company. Today's episode was produced by Calvin Marty, Chelsea Ho Medina Sabich, Wendy Nielsen, and me, Meg Escobosa. This podcast is engineered, edited, mixed and scored by Calvin Marty. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. It really does make a difference and share the show with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions, comments, or guest suggestions, please email us at podcast@thekrinskyco.com and visit us on the web at www.thekrinskyco.com.

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