Coordinator finds sanity in long drive and loud music

The ritual started when Holly Ho-Chee-DuPont was working at Hilo Medical Center.

At the end of each fully wrung day, she would get in her car, turn the music up loud and head home via a long, downhill stretch of Waianuenue Avenue.

“I’d be on the top of that long road heading toward the ocean, and I’d tell myself that by the time I passed Cronies Bar and Grill at the bottom, everything that happened at work would be behind me,” she said.

Call it a survival tactic. As an oncology patient navigator, it was Ho-Chee-DuPont’s job to ensure coordinated care, coverage and other concerns for people with cancer and their families. It was, and is, draining work, the sort of job that simply does not allow for rest, restoration or strategic downtime. And Ho-Chee-DuPont was, and is, one of the best at it.

Now a coordinator for oncology patient services at The Queen’s Medical Center, Ho-Chee-DuPont continues her after-work ritual, cranking up the volume and giving herself until the corner of Waialae Avenue and St. Louis Drive to shake off the stresses of the day.

This is as much breathing space as Ho-Chee-DuPont allows herself, a sanity-saving moment at the elbow of a day that starts at sunrise teaching seminary to young members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and ends in the company of her husband, Doug, and her mother-in-law, Amanda, preparing for the next day’s crush.

Born and raised in Honomu on Hawaii island, Ho-Chee-DuPont credits her parents and her family’s Mormon faith with instilling in her the values of hard work, self-sufficiency and service to others.

Ho-Chee-DuPont attended Brigham Young University-Hawaii and served a church mission in San Diego before finding work at the nonprofit Bay Clinic, where she worked to ensure needed care for underprivileged populations. She spent seven years there before joining Hilo Medical Center. A year ago she and her husband moved to Oahu to live with her recently widowed mother-­in-law.

Ho-Chee-DuPont said her work overseeing a team of patient navigators is deeply fulfilling, if at times emotionally draining.

“When you get diagnosed with cancer, your whole life shuts down and you’re really in a fog,” she said. “Your options are cut, and you don’t know if you’ll survive. I might work with a 30-year-old with two small kids to worry about or someone in their 80s who feels they’ve had a good life and it’s OK. The needs are always different, and no day is ever the same.”

For those who are terminal, Ho-Chee-DuPont serves as a special kind of coach, helping patients plan for their death so they can be at peace when the moment comes.

“Many times they don’t know how to die,” she said. “I let them know that they still have a purpose, whether it’s making sure there is life insurance for their wife, or making sure the mortgage is paid off, or even helping their children understand that, ‘Yes, I love you but I still have to die.’”

Beyond her job at Queen’s, Ho-Chee-DuPont also serves as a volunteer state lead ambassador for the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, advocating for legislation that benefits people with cancer.

Last month she traveled to Washington, D.C., along with more than 700 cancer patients, survivors, volunteers and ACS staff to lobby Hawaii’s congressional delegation to support increased funding for research at the National Institutes of Health, remove barriers to the Colorectal Cancer Screening Act and support the Palliative Care and Hospice Education Training Act.

While her work and volunteer advocacy demand much, Ho-Chee-DuPont said she feels renewed each waking morning.

“What helps me is I don’t have any expectations,” she says. “I don’t know what the day will be like. I just ask, ‘Which one today? Who needs me today?’”

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.