Want more birthday?

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I'm sure you've heard of the More Birthdays campaign from the American Cancer Society. We've blogged on it, including a video of Ricky Martin crooning the birthday song on his bongos (Do cancer survivors celebrate birthdays differently?). Earlier this summer, the ACS launched a grassroots Create More Birthdays Contest that asked individuals to upload videos of them singing the song or original artwork that has inspired them to celebrate a world with less cancer. The non-profit has received more than 100 "Happy Birthday" videos and pieces of art. The top 12 finalists have now been announced, results came from public online votes and the contest's official judges. The grand prize winners will be selected by a final online poll that ends on Aug 22. Winners will be featured on the morebirthdays.com website with Ricky Martin and other music artists and have their artwork featured in an exclusive card collection.Each person who votes is also entered into a sweepstakes for a More Birthdays gift pack, which includes "More Birthdays" gift wrap, posters, limited-edition prints and birthday cards. You can view and vote for the videos and artwork of the top dozen at my.morebirthdays.com. I have to admit that the CURE staff fiddled with the idea of creating its own Happy Birthday video, but we decided to leave it to the professionals--You!From the ACS, here is the list of finalists:MUSIC• Jessi sings "Happy Birthday" (by Jessi Hardin)

• Happy Birthday on Lap Steel (by Greg Vorobiov)

• Happy Birthday to Me! (by Jeri Lyn Baker)

• Happy Birthday! :3 (by Mari-Ann Bui)

• Survivor (by Jennifer Taylor)

• Happy Birthday (by Shannon Eileen Bachmann) ART:• Sing (by Amy Turner)

• More Birthdays Because of Women's Screen (by Marilyn Brown)

• 11 Million Wishes (by Sam Mendez)

• Innocence (by Sylwia Baran)

• Relay For A Cure (by Johnny Gene Wilson)

• into dreams (by Faun Donald) So, who are your favorites?

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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.
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, an expert on CLL
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, and Josie Montegaard, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, experts on CLL
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