Jen Nelson-Cave knows stress. A 911 dispatcher with CU Anschutz for about seven years, Nelson-Cave handled life-or-death situations over the phone on a daily basis. It was the kind of work that weighs on a person (roughly 20% of emergency dispatch personnel suffer from PTSD), but Nelson-Cave said she was “accustomed to stress that goes away.”
“Where I could just set down my headset and run,” she explained with a slight chuckle. But in October of 2019, a permanent stress entered Nelson-Cave’s life: breast cancer.