Wednesday, April 30, 2008

How People Feel About Cancer

This will be very short today and is a follow up to yesterday’s posting. When Leroy Siever’s of NPR asked people to finish the sentence that began with, “My cancer,” 276 people responded. The responses came from cancer patients, family members of people who have or had cancer, people who were afraid of getting cancer, and those who wanted to understand the disease. Although, at times, I find some of the responses Pollyannaish in the posts that people leave on Leroy’s site, yesterday was an exception. I read (or at a minimum skimmed) each and every post. They ranged from thankful for the lessons learned to living in dreaded fear for the loss for themselves or a loved one due to the disease. There was unabashed honesty throughout the comments. They ranged in size from a few word phase to a page of text. If you’d like to better understand how cancer affects people, I encourage you to go to the site referenced below, find the April 29 2008 entry, and read through the 276 comments. It’s free and no login or password is required.

Reference – Leroy Siever’s NPR Blog
http://www.npr.org/blogs/mycancer/

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