More than 2,000 cancer survivors and family members to toast each other on June 7 in celebration of living cancer-free

Upon leaving Saturday Night Live, Ms. Sweeney enjoyed great success, starring in a feature film called It’s Pat, based on the famous and funny non-gender-specific character. Just months after moving back to Los Angeles from New York, Julia’s brother Michael was diagnosed with lymphoma. Very soon afterwards, Julia was diagnosed with a rare form of cervical cancer.

Her touching, painfully personal and also humorous experiences of this horrendous ordeal eventually became her powerful one-woman show, entitled God Said Ha!, which debuted in San Francisco’s Magic Theater in 1995. The popular show soon moved to Broadway, winning the 1996 New York Comedy Festival’s Audience Award and a Best Comedy Album Grammy nomination for the show’s CD recording. The film version was released in 1998, directed by Ms. Sweeney and produced by Quentin Tarantino. The film earned the Golden Space Needle Award at the Seattle Film Festival and was released on DVD in 2003.

The June 7 event marks the second time that North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset and LIJ Medical Center in New Hyde Park have combined their annual Cancer Survivors’ Day celebrations. The venue for this year’s event is the Monter Cancer Center, part of the North Shore-LIJ Health System’s 450,000-square-foot Center for Advanced Medicine, located at 450 Lakeville Road in Lake Success. Opened in April 2006, the Monter Cancer Center provides ambulatory cancer services in a calming atmosphere complete with indoor gardens and three 120-foot-long skylights. The $17 million, 37,000-square-foot center includes 32 chemotherapy stations furnished with plasma-screen televisions, and 23 examination and consultation rooms. Other features include social work and support services, nutrition counseling, a bone marrow-stem cell transplant program and a patient education center.

Cancer patients of North Shore University Hospital and LIJ who are interested in attending the event should call 516-734-8947.

About North Shore-LIJ: The nation's third largest, non-profit, secular healthcare system, the North Shore-LIJ Health System cares for people of all ages throughout Long Island, Queens and Staten Island — a service area encompassing more than five million people. The health system consists of 15 hospitals, 17 long-term care facilities, a medical research institute, three trauma centers, five home health agencies, a hospice network and dozens of outpatient centers. Excluding its affiliate organizations, North Shore-LIJ facilities house 4,844 beds. North Shore-LIJ has more than 7,000 physicians, about 10,000 nurses and a total workforce of about 38,000 — the largest employer on Long Island and the ninth largest in New York City. For more information, go to www.northshorelij.com.