MOBILE, Alabama -- When you meet Dr. Jana Rocker, you can’t help but notice the empty left sleeve of her white coat tucked neatly into her pocket. She has been missing the arm for 30 years, something she might have felt self-conscious about less than a decade ago. But now it serves as motivation.

As a researcher, she’s “tenacious,” according to Dr. Lewis Pannell. her boss and mentor at Mitchell Cancer Institute. He watched her struggle during her first 18 months as a doctoral research student in his lab as she tried to develop methods for her sampling approach, each of which had to be methodically tried and refined.

“But Jana worked her way through the difficult problem she had to solve,” Pannell said. “She is very sharp and knows what she has to achieve. She’s never gives up.” Her tenacity eventually led to a routine approach that has been used on more than 350 samples to date.

Rocker holds a unique place as a member of Pannell’s research team, who says, “Having had cancer herself, she brings an understanding of the disease. And her research is extremely promising. “

The lump that won't go away

In February of 1982, when Rocker was 10 years old, she was playing on an exercise machine when she felt a twinge of pain in her shoulder. It kept bothering her, so her parents took her to the doctor, who diagnosed a pulled muscle and advised them not to worry.

But the pain continued and a lump the size of an orange appeared. Her parents went back to the doctor who said it was an infection in the muscle and prescribed antibiotics. The lump continued to grow.

“By this time, it was the size of a grapefruit and hard as a rock,” Rocker recalls. My mom said, ‘we’re not going to wait anymore. We’re going to get some answers.”

Even though it was a Sunday, her parents took her to a sports medicine specialist in Dallas who did something no doctor had done up to that point. He took an X-ray, which detected a solid mass. That evening, the fifth-grader was in Baylor Hospital, where a biopsy revealed osteosarcoma, a very aggressive bone tumor.

“At that point, everyone advised us to go MD Anderson or St. Jude, but the doctor told my parents we didn’t have time to wait a week for an appointment. We needed to do something now,” Rocker said.

The doctor referred the family to Dr. George Cierny, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who was a specialist in limb salvage. Cierny would later become the go-to guy to whom Ross Perot would send wounded veterans.

Cierny performed another biopsy and recommended immediate surgery for the aggressive tumor. Since he would not know if he could save the limb until he was in surgery, he was careful to explain what she could expect.

“I was very interested in science, even at age 10. Dr. Cierny saw that and he was always good about explaining things to me in real, scientific terms, but ones that a kid could understand,” she remembers.

In surgery, Cierny found the tumor had enveloped the blood vessel and nerve, so the arm had to be amputated. He also removed her clavicle and shoulder blade. She started chemotherapy a week later.

“I was 10 years old so I thought, ‘this is great. I’ll get to miss school and play with my Atari all day long.’ Then I started chemotherapy. I tasted metal in my mouth, and then I threw up. And I didn’t stop for a year.”

A career detour

Dr. Rocker believes the aggressive surgery and treatment saved her. With the cancer gone, she went on with her life. In order to fit in, she always wore either a cosmetic or robotic prosthetic arm.

“Throughout high school and college I would never let someone see me without the arm. I was very self-conscious, “ she says.

Rocker pursued her scientific interest at the University of North Texas, receiving a bachelor’s of science degree in biology with a minor in chemistry. In her second year in the master’s program, she had an encounter that altered her path for the next decade.

She wanted to focus on biochemistry, but the professor in charge of the lab told her he wouldn’t accept her because he didn’t feel she could work safely in a lab with one arm. Recognizing her computer talent, he suggested she instead pursue the then-emerging field of bioinformatics, the computer analysis of large amounts of data.

“All I heard was, ‘You can’t do it.’ I’m 24 years old, and this professor I idolized just told me he wouldn’t put me in his lab. I was devastated. So I stopped going to class and dropped out.”

As if to reinforce his belief, years later she Googled “one-armed scientists” and couldn’t find any.

She got a job doing computer technical support and left research behind for the next 10 years. She met her future husband through a friend and moved to Gulfport.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina forced her to re-evaluate her career. While commuting to a satellite office for Hancock Bank in Baton Rouge, La., she decided to get out of banking and back into science. She got a job with the Gulf Coast Research Lab and enrolled in the University of Southern Mississippi to pursue a master’s degree in coastal sciences.

Appointment with destiny

In 2008, Rocker had an appointment at Mitchell Cancer Institute on the first day the new building opened. As she approached the entrance, she walked by the glass windows and looked into the working labs. She realized she knew how to use most of the equipment and decided then she wanted to work there.

Though she was still completing her master’s at the University of Southern Mississippi, she applied to the PhD program at the University of South Alabama and was accepted. She did a rotation in Pannell’s lab and never left.

“Dr. Pannell has a passion for his research,” said Rocker. “You can tell it’s not just a job for him.” Motivated by her father’s close call with colon cancer, she did her thesis on the early detection of the disease.

When she started the PhD program in 2009 she touched base with an old friend, her former physician, Dr. George Cierny. She even dedicated her thesis to the man who saved her life. When she tried to contact him recently to inform him she would be graduating, she found his obituary. He had passed away in July at the age of 66 as a result of pancreatic cancer.

Cierny’s death makes her research even more meaningful and urgent. While her doctoral work focuses on colon cancer, Pannell said the methodology has formed the groundwork for extremely promising research in the detection of pancreatic cancer, one of the most deadly forms of the disease. It has also spawned three other projects.

In December, at age 40, she earned her Ph.D. and became Dr. Jana Rocker. She will stay on in the lab to get her post-doctoral degree, publish, apply for grants and continue her research.

She no longer wears a prosthetic arm. For one thing, in the South, it’s just too hot to wear one. Plus, she doesn’t need it. She has more than proven herself in the lab, and with her determination, focus and exciting research, you’ll surely start to find this “one-armed scientist” on Google now, and for years to come, as she advances research in the detection of gastrointestinal cancers.

By Meredith Portman | USA Health Services Foundation