From The Editor January/February 2014

Welcome to the first issue of The Oncology Nurse-APN/PA (TON) for 2014. We’re looking forward to a year of keeping you up-to-date about what is happening in the world of oncology research and bringing you information that helps you in your day-to-day practice as a healthcare professional.

In this issue, we tell you about some of the news coming out of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS). Our coverage from SABCS includes an analysis of the psychosocial and physical challenges faced by survivors of breast cancer—a situation that has become more pressing as diagnostics and treatment have advanced. We also cover quality-of-life issues for patients with metastatic breast cancer, including the concern that many patients are not receiving appropriate end-of-life care and are often overtreated with chemotherapy that has little chance of benefit.
This issue also starts our coverage of the news from the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting. You’ll see more news in the next issue of TON as we continue to cover the highlights from ASH.

Be sure to read Angela Long’s Hide No Hair article about the options available to women who have lost their hair while undergoing chemotherapy. Angela tells us about her own experiences with hair loss and provides great tips to help us guide our patients through this process. This month’s Reader Poll asks if your patients talk to you about hair loss (see below). Please let us know what your patients are telling you and how you respond to their concerns.

Sue Bond, FNP-ANP, is a new voice to TON. She writes about the difficulty of balancing work and home life for those who work in the field of oncology, asking “Do overachieving busy people choose this profession, or does this profession make us overachieving busy people?”

As always, I encourage you to visit our website, www.TheOncologyNurse.com. Be sure to tell us what topics you want to see covered in TON. Let us know if you would be interested in writing an article for TON. We want to hear from you, and we appreciate your feedback—positive and negative—about what you see in print and on the website.