Pink football gloves

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Fall is, by far, my most favorite season. The weather is perfect for coffee and outdoor activities, back to school and, of course, football. It's also when Breast Cancer Awareness gets geared up. So, it's not unusual that the two collide: breast cancer and football.As my husband and I watched our Ole Miss Rebels this weekend, he noticed the pink gloves the players wore in honor of breast cancer awareness. The next day, the NFL players wore their pink gear, which will later be auctioned off for "A Crucial Catch," a program to benefit the American Cancer Society's screening and outreach programs. He also mentioned recent coverage of a young boy who walked off during a football game because his coach wouldn't let him wear pink gloves (his mother had breast cancer).This all led him to the conclusion that he wanted to get our 8-year-old son pink football gloves for October. I'm on the fence about this. I worry that it's pinkwashing. I worry that we're sending the wrong message. And what is our message? That we're aware it's breast cancer awareness month? Or are we doing it in support of a special person in our lives?It turned into a teaching moment and a interesting conversation: Asking those hard questions to my husband on why he wanted him to have the gloves. Is it to support women battling breast cancer like Lisa Adams, who recently discovered her cancer has come back in her bones? Or to honor his grandmother, who died of breast cancer? Or is it just because pro-football players are doing it? It also started the conversation with my son. Did he know why these guys were wearing pink gloves? Does he know what breast cancer is? And what's something we could do to help people with this disease? What are your thoughts?

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Image of a woman with short blonde hair wearing a white blazer.
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
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