Man leaves job to become nurse after wife dies of breast cancer

Louisville, Oct 5: Jill Brzezinski-Conley was an impressive personality when she was alive. She was a strong symbol of life that cancer could not tame till her death in 2016 at the age of 38. In 2013, she had said at a cancer gala that she was "going to die the happiest woman in the world."

Her exit was tough to accept for her near and dear ones and especially her husband Bart who, for a while, found it tough to get out of his bed. "Sometimes it feels like yesterday. I'm blessed that there's a lot of videos, and I watch them all the time. For a while, just getting out of bed was tough for me," the 44-year-old man told TODAY.

But Bart kept on searching for purpose in life and two years after the passing away of his beloved wife, he found it. The man left his business and started training to become a nurse at Norton Women's and Children's Hospital in Louisville, their home town in Kentucky.

"We had just a wonderful staff of nurses that always took care of her. I want to be that nurse that the family can depend on, the patient can depend on, going the extra mile, which a lot of the nurses did for Jill," the man was quoted as saying by TODAY.

Besides, Bart has also carried on working for Jill's Wish, the foundation the couple created to help ease the financial burden on families that have to carry expenses for breast cancer for a member. The foundation has distributed more than $250,000 in grants for financial assistance.