Helping Patients With Cancer Fit Exercise Into Their Lives

Article

Patients, nurses and caregivers to those with cancer, we want to know what kind of exercise works for you, and how you stay motivated. Join us in our upcoming #CureConnect tweet chat!

Physical activity is one of the most underutilized, simple, inexpensive and effective means of maintaining and restoring health. The benefits of exercise extend to all parts of our lives, not just our physical fitness.

These benefits include keeping our independence as we age; improving self-image, confidence, and posture; reducing fatigue; controlling weight; managing stress; improving mood; and for cancer patients and survivors, reducing risk of recurrence as well as other chronic health conditions.

Patients, caregivers, survivors and nurses can all benefit from increasing physical activity in our daily lives. Setting small and reasonable goals, getting social support from others and making the time to do it are all important parts of sticking to an exercise program. Nurses can help patients with supportive messages while they educate patients on the importance of staying active.

Learning a few important considerations about exercise before increasing your level of physical activity can go a long way toward making it safe, healthy, effective and enjoyable, so that you reap the benefits from the moment you start and can more easily maintain an active lifestyle into the future.

Please join me Thursday, October 13 at 9 pm EST, for the next #CureConnect chat as we discuss the benefits of exercise, how to fit it into your lifestyle, and how to stay motivated so you’ll keep doing it.

Tweet: I’ll be at the #CureConnect chat Oct 13 at 9pm EST with @cure_magazine and @oncologynursingnews talking about cancer and exercise. Join me!

Alene Nitzky, PhD, RN, OCN @cancerharbors is an oncology nurse, cancer exercise trainer and health coach, and is CEO/Founder of Cancer Harbors® and FIERCE®: Functional & Fit, Independent, Energized, Restored, Confident, & Empowered. Cancer Harbors is an online survivorship support resource which also hosts instructional videos with individual exercises and routines. Cancer Harbors will be available in print and e-book versions in 2017.

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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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