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When Dolores Jacoby's doctor told her there was little she could do to treat her acute myeloid leukemia, a deafening silence filled the hospital room, where she was surrounded by her family. Dolores had only recently been diagnosed with the rare aggressive cancer. Her beloved nursing assistant, Janeth, was standing just outside her room. After the doctor left, Janeth entered with a tray containing each family member's favorite beverage. If there's anybody who can recover, it's your mother," she told John Jacoby, Dolores's son, before leaving the room as inconspicuously as she had arrived.

It was 2012. More than a decade later, John still remembers that day in his mother's hospital room in the San Francisco Bay Area clearly. We had just heard the worst news of our lives, and Janeth injected life into my mom, into her veins, into the atmosphere, you know, for all of us," he said.