Katherine Wilson, an inspirational and dedicated graduate of the UNC School of Nursing, died Feb. 16 after a 4 1/2-year battle with cancer. She was 28.
Now the University community is mounting a fund-raising effort to ensure her name is not forgotten.
Wilson entered nursing school in 1999 and was slated to graduate in 2001. Several months after joining school, she was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer, a rare form of the disease usually found in 50-year-olds. Wilson is the youngest person on the East Coast to be diagnosed with the condition.
“She was undaunted,” said Norma Hawthorne, director of advancement at the nursing school. “She had this extraordinary desire to become a nurse.”
When chemotherapy and radiation started to deteriorate Wilson’s eyesight, her mother read her textbooks into a recorder so she could continue to study, Hawthorne said.
While in nursing school, Wilson organized a campuswide bone marrow drive and advocated for a cancer hospital to be constructed in Chapel Hill. Wilson graduated as a member of Sigma Theta Tau, a national nursing honor society, in May 2004.
Wilson, a Morganton native, showed her determination to succeed from a young age. While in middle school, she was the first girl to play on an all-boys soccer team when no teams were available for girls.
Six weeks before Wilson died, several friends decided to establish a scholarship in her honor for an undergraduate nursing student.
“She was ecstatic that she would be able to live on and have an impact, even after she passed, through the scholarship,” Hawthorne said.
