Blogging about cancer is a tricky thing. Do you post personal stuff? Medical stuff? Research news? I wasn’t comfortable posting my cancer “road trip” on Facebook but I did send monthly updates to a small community of friends and family. Now that I look back it was basically a blog—unedited, unscripted, and as raw as I was feeling. I think it helped people know exactly what was going on in my head, since it’s usually much different than what people think you’re feeling. What I loved reading when I was sick was anything that made me say, “Yes, yes.” That was comforting.
I’ve decided to post a few of my “R-rated” (as in, raw-rated) updates so that any patients, survivors, spouses, family members, friends, cousins of survivors–anyone in the circle–might for a minute be struck by a paragraph and say, “Me, too.”
I’m calling them Stage IV Stories; they won’t be in This is Cancer. (To put them in context, I was diagnosed in late autumn 2012.)
I also started blogging about big (and small) moments that I thought were universal and might be helpful if you’re deep in: deep in treatment, deep in survivorship, deep in as a caregiver. I try to blog twice a month (unless something really amazing happens, and I’ll write sooner, or I can’t find a babysitter and will post less often).
