Oncology on Canvas Winner's Cancer Experience Shapes Her Artwork

Article

Susan Hope Schaffer, the 2014 Oncology on Canvas overall winner, shares how her experience with breast cancer helped her evolve as an artist.

Susan Hope Schaffer, this year's Oncology on Canvas overall winner, shares how her experience with breast cancer has helped her evolve as an artist. Her piece, "Visions of Hope," highlights how her medical team, family and other cancer survivors gave her hope through diagnosis and treatment.

"My cancer journey has gone from some pain and anguish to a beautiful result, and that's the artwork that I've created," she says. Schaffer wants her artwork, which she has submitted to the Oncology on Canvas art competition since 2008, to give hope and energy to others going through cancer.

Schaffer, who is from Bethlehem, Pa., said the competition has given her a voice over the years to document her journey, including appreciation, fear and anger. This year's piece, she says, shows the hope she's gained from her cancer experience. "Visions of Hope," along with hundreds of other submissions to this year's competition, will be on display throughout the United States in a traveling art exhibit beginning in early 2015.

[Watch "Oncology on Canvas and The Hope Murals Project Reaches New York City"]

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For patients with cancer, the ongoing chemotherapy shortage may cause some anxiety as they wonder how they will receive their drugs. However, measuring drugs “down to the minutiae of the milligrams” helped patients receive the drugs they needed, said Alison Tray. Tray is an advanced oncology certified nurse practitioner and current vice president of ambulatory operations at Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Jersey. If patients are concerned about getting their cancer drugs, Tray noted that having “an open conversation” between patients and providers is key. “As a provider and a nurse myself, having that conversation, that reassurance and sharing the information is a two-way conversation,” she said. “So just knowing that we're taking care of you, we're going to make sure that you receive the care that you need is the key takeaway.” In June 2023, many patients were unable to receive certain chemotherapy drugs, such as carboplatin and cisplatin because of an ongoing shortage. By October 2023, experts saw an improvement, although the “ongoing crisis” remained. READ MORE: Patients With Lung Cancer Face Unmet Needs During Drug Shortages “We’re really proud of the work that we could do and achieve that through a critical drug shortage,” Tray said. “None of our patients missed a dose of chemotherapy and we were able to provide that for them.” Tray sat down with CURE® during the 49th Annual Oncology Nursing Society Annual Congress to discuss the ongoing chemo shortage and how patients and care teams approached these challenges. Transcript: Particularly at Hartford HealthCare, when we established this infrastructure, our goal was to make sure that every patient would get the treatment that they need and require, utilizing the data that we have from ASCO guidelines to ensure that we're getting the optimal high-quality standard of care in a timely fashion that we didn't have to delay therapies. So, we were able to do that by going down to the minutiae of the milligrams on hand, particularly when we had a lot of critical drug shortages. So it was really creating that process to really ensure that every patient would get the treatment that they needed. For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.
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