Giuliana Rancic: Finding the Light at the End of the Tunnel

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Entertainment journalist and breast cancer survivor Giuliana Rancic shared her cancer journey before she presented at the 2019 Extraordinary Healer Award for Oncology Nursing.

Best known for her work on E! News, Giuliana Rancic revealed her ability to find the light at the end of the tunnel following her breast cancer journey.

Before the 2019 Extraordinary Healer Award for Oncology Nursing, Rancic shared on her cancer journey, assuring other women that they are not alone. “Something that helped me were the four words, ‘This too, shall pass’. With every little tough moment I was having, I would keep falling back on that. Just knowing that it’s going to get better, knowing that it’s OK to feel scared, it’s OK to be sad, it’s OK to wake up in the middle of the night and be terrified. It’s so normal and so many people feel the way you do.”

Cancer-free for seven years, she also discussed the hardest years of her journey with breast cancer. “It was very hard for me to feel like I could go back to a life without thinking about breast cancer 100 times a day,” Rancic said. “And I’m living proof that it can happen.”

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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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