Montana Brown, a 24-year-old woman from Atlanta, just achieved her long-time dream: to become a nurse at the same hospital where she was treated for — and beat cancer — twice.
When Brown was 2-years-old she was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancer that targets connective tissues in the body like muscles, fat, bones, the linings of joints, and blood vessels, according to the American Cancer Society. She spent a year going to the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta for chemotherapy, and then went into remission. But, when she was 15, the cancer came back.
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"I had just tried out for my high school cheerleading team," Brown told ABC News. "I actually ran a mile while I had cancer and had no idea...There weren't symptoms but my mom and dad could tell that something was different about me and they knew that something was a little off."
After her second diagnosis, Brown went back to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta for chemo, and beat the disease again. She remembers how "extremely loving and caring and compassionate" the nurses were, both when she was 2 (from what her mom tells her) and when she was a teenager. So Brown made it her life goal to help sick kids, just as those nurses who helped her did.
Last week, she succeeded. She began working at the same hospital where she was treated both times after completing training to be a pediatric oncology nurse.
"Never in a million years did I think that at the age of 24 I would have achieved my biggest and wildest dream — to work at the hospital I was treated at as a child/teenager," Brown wrote on Facebook. "It's amazing and crazy and awesome and I'm SO excited to work for such an inspirational organization!"
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