Ashely Lance knows the sixth floor of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt better than most.

As a pediatric oncology nurse, this is where she spends most of her time caring for patients as they engage in a battle no child should have to endure. But she knows how to relate – because she’s been there before.

Lance was only 12 years old the first time she saw the sixth floor. An active preteen, Lance thought she had simply pulled a muscle when she felt a pain in her back one day. But when the discomfort didn’t subside, an MRI revealed something much more important.

Doctors discovered a mass the size of a softball on Lance’s spine – a discovery that instantly changed the trajectory of his childhood. Instead of returning to seventh grade after the break, Lance found herself residing at Vanderbilt for 22 days for the first time to battle stage three large B-cell lymphoma.

“I ended up going through eight rounds of chemo in eight months, and all of them were hospitalized, so I spent a lot of time on the sixth floor getting to know everyone, the patients and the staff,” Lance said. “It’s kind of become my second home.”

Most people’s natural reaction would probably be a desire to never set foot in such a place again after a pediatric cancer diagnosis.

But today, 17 years later, she can’t imagine being anywhere else.

“Working again at Vanderbilt on the sixth floor feels a lot like a familiar experience, but the difference is I’ve been there on both sides,” Lance said. “As a patient, you can see the hard things, but also the fun things they do for the kids, especially because it’s really hard being a kid in the hospital. I got to see everything that and I bonded with a lot of my nurses and they made the experience as enjoyable as it could be, and that’s basically what made me want to become a nurse. I attribute everything to the. nurses there since I was a child. My goal has always been simple. will ultimately be like them.

“Some of my favorite memories on the sixth floor as a patient were definitely related to the child’s life. They were an integral part of everything. And they involve music therapy and so many different things just to make things a little more normal and less sad. My other favorite memory is when my aunt bought me a slingshot monkey. He basically had really extendable arms, and my nurses and I were in the hallway trying to see who could shoot farther with the slingshot monkey. It probably wasn’t the smartest idea at the time, but it made us forget a little bit about what was happening… It’s definitely one of my best memories.

Lance and many of her colleagues will be on hand when the Predators host their annual Hockey Fights Cancer Night this Saturday at Bridgestone Arena, an evening she says she wouldn’t miss for anything.