Oncology Nurses

We've known for a long time that oncology nurses love CURE magazine. Back when we did patient forums, we often had a number of oncology nurses sign up. They came at their own expense to educate themselves to be better healers. Our Extraordinary Healer event is now five years old, and at this year's Oncology Nursing Society Meeting we awarded the fifth nurse with a spa weekend. And now we are working on creating a magazine just for oncology nurses named, you guessed it, Extraordinary Healers. The first issue will appear this fall as a special issue of CURE, but we are hoping the magazine will be a quarterly next year, serving as a sister publication to CURE and helping with nurse patient communication by offering both groups their own take on a story. The title wasn't hard to come up with since these men and women are extraordinary. I was reminded of that again this week when I sent out an invitation to one of the presenters at ONS who I asked to join the advisory board for this new magazine. The advisory board is critical in the creation of Extraordinary Healers magazine because they know what nurses need and want and, since we want this to be a unique publication for this group, we wanted to go directly to the source. Asking busy health care professionals to take time out of their day to help us can be daunting. While many of the nurses on the board have been with us a long time, this nurse was new to me. I had read her presentation from ONS about "moral distress" for nurses and was really impressed. So I wrote her a long email explaining who we were and what we planned to do and how much I need nurse researchers such as herself to help guide us in the content for the new publication. I eagerly awaited her reply, hoping she wouldn't say, "Who are you and what do you want again."Instead, she sent back an email that started, "WOW," that went on to tell me how excited she was to be asked and thanking me for asking her. She was also nominated as an Extraordinary Healer in 2010. Aren't oncology nurses great. Call your oncology nurse today and let him or her know how much you appreciate what they have done to make a terrible situation better.