Thanksgiving for caregiving

Article

On Oct. 29, President Obama declared November 2010 National Family Caregivers Month. (You can read the full proclamation at www.whitehouse.gov.)Personally, I've never thought about having a month to honor and celebrate caregivers before. But these past few years have been different for my family. I've moved back home after being out of state for two years, and being back closer to my family has brought things more into focus.I have watched family members be affected by various illnesses. There have been hospital visits and uber-clean environments. I have seen other family members step up and become primary caregivers while others take smaller supportive roles. These experiences have forced me to examine the many hats a caregiver must wear and to understand my own small part in the process.Honoring caregivers in the same month we celebrate Thanksgiving is perfect. It's a great reminder of the people we have to be thankful for. And I know that as my very large family gathers around the turkey this year, I will be a little extra grateful for my family and the multiple ways they show they care.To learn more about navigating the family caregiver role and find helpful resources, read CURE's 2008 article, The Invisible Caregiver.

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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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