Sexuality and cancer: the final frontier for nurses.

E241 A lthough I had been a member of the Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) since the 1980s, it was not until 1991 that I first attended Congress. That year, Dorothy Smith, from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, delivered the Mara lectureship, and I was thrilled to be present because I had worked with Dot. Alas, I am no Dot Smith, but I do hope I inspire many of you to address sexuality issues with your patients. We talk about everything with our patients—bowel and bladder habits, nausea and vomiting—but we do not address sexuality issues. It is the last frontier for us, and I will give you tools to use to help make you more comfortable addressing these issues. Our patients think they are the only ones with sexual concerns because we talk about everything else with them. When they are in the waiting room, they chat with each other about everything but sexuality issues. So they feel very lonely and isolated with these concerns. It is very hard for us to think about sexuality and cancer at the same time because they do not seem to go together. When you think about sexuality, you usually use positive or neutral words, but cancer usually is associated with negative words. We are very focused on treating cancer and forget about sexuality and its importance to patients.