Clara A. Mason: Pioneer Black nurse practitioner, caretaker of children with cancer
Clara A. Mason, MSN, RNC, FNP, was a trailblazer in the advanced practice oncology nursing field.
“Helping others has always been a part of my life, and becoming a nurse was a way of achieving that. As a Black woman, I had to be the best in the field to show I was capable of doing the job — it was an unspoken but known rule,” Mason, retired nurse practitioner in the division of hematology-oncology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, said in an interview with Healio.
Mason was one of the first Black women to work as a nurse practitioner at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. She authored and co-authored more than 20 published studies on childhood cancer during her career.
“I chose St. Jude after caring for a child with leukemia on my pediatric rotation while in nursing school,” said Mason, who began her tenure at St. Jude in 1966. “The patient was about 18 months of age, and there were no effective treatments for her leukemia at that time, except blood transfusions. This is why I chose to work for St. Jude, to help other patients like her.”
Mason recalled how different St. Jude was when she started there, specifically the small size of the Memphis facility.
“There were only a couple of operators on switchboards and only one security guard for the entire hospital,” she said. “There may have been a total of only 20 beds at the time, with two beds per room, so you can imagine how crowded the rooms were.”
St. Jude was not well-known at the time, as it had opened just 4 years earlier, in 1962.
“Patients and their families would fly into Memphis, get into a cab and ask to be driven to St. Jude, but the driver would not know where it was. They would then have to call the hospital to get the switchboard operator, who would say they are located next door to St. Joseph Hospital, and they would then know where to go.”
Mason was working at St. Jude when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot at the Lorraine Motel and later died at St. Joseph Hospital.
“It was a tense time in the city of Memphis and across the nation. You never knew what was going to happen to and from work. I did not know if I would be stopped or not,” Mason said. “But once I got to St. Jude, I was OK. It was like a different world when I walked into the hospital — it was such a relaxed atmosphere. It was a great place to work. Everyone was so friendly, and it was just a wonderful place.”
St. Jude did not have a surgical suite at that time, so Mason would help transport pediatric patients requiring surgery via an underground walkway to the adjacent St. Joseph Hospital.
“I also learned how to perform procedures such as bone marrow aspirate, biopsies and spinal taps. I managed to do them quite efficiently,” she said. “For anyone starting out in the oncology nursing field, I would recommend getting a good experience in general medicine first, because it is important and valuable to have a good, basic medical background before going into oncology.”
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Clara A. Mason, MSN, RNC, FNP, can be reached at caverymaso@gmail.com.