If you're here reading this, you know enough about the internet to realize the sum of its parts - email, the web, chatrooms, instant messaging, 'blogs and lists - has changed the way our world works. It certainly changed the way I deal with terminal illness and death. I spent years working with our local AIDS community group in the '80s and so I am no stranger to death and dying.
But what a different world we live in now.
The first time I joined a listserv devoted to a terminal illness and encountered the phenonema of medical sig lines, I felt the shift. And within hours of Ron's tumour diagnosis I knew to sign up for brain tumour lists. In between frantic research forays for the latest info on clinical trials and experimental treatments, I visited 'blogs set up by survivors and loved ones.
I learned about the road ahead. If sites like Virtualtrials.com were like a traveller's notebook, with addresses and phone numbers to the world's specialists, then PubMed and MedLine were the maps, the travel guides. And the 'blogs became my Paul Theroux, my Bill Bryson, and yes, my P.J. O'Rourke as I navigated this journey.
And now I find myself keeping a 'blog.
Calgary journalist and friend Val Fortney called me up a day or two ago to interview me
for a column today about the use of 'blogs to chronicle cancer journeys.
She writes: "The Internet has gotten a bad rap, and deservedly so. It's overflowing with hardcore porn, spam fills our inboxes every day and far too many blogs are a cyberspace form of vanity press, providing a podium for the dull and ill informed. Then, there are those hidden gems provided by people like
Andrew Wark and Ron Graham, who have gifted us with stories that teach us about appreciating life and facing death with courage, humour and love. The catharsis such blogs provide for writer and reader strengthens both, and ultimately leads to a greater sense of community."
