Illness diaries create a therapeutic Web
The blogosphere has never been known for its patience. But it does boast a healthy number of patients.
Their online journals — including one maintained by a Spokane woman battling breast cancer — typically provide medical updates, forge connections with fellow sufferers and raise awareness of various maladies.
When patients are too young or incapacitated to post items, loved ones often detail their illnesses and injuries for them.
That’s what happened in the bizarre case of Laura VanRyn. The Michigan woman was killed in an April auto accident, but she was misidentified as her college friend Whitney Cerak.
As the comatose Cerak recovered from extensive injuries, VanRyn’s parents gathered at her bedside. Believing she was their daughter, they updated her progress via Laura VanRyn’s blog for five weeks. After dental records revealed the mistake, Cerak’s family created a journal for Whitney, who’s now conscious and undergoing physical therapy.
The illness blog of Spokane’s Susan Cerutti-Jensen hasn’t generated international headlines like the VanRyn-Cerak saga did. But her public Susan’s Journey site and a related journal for family and friends have helped spread the word that breast cancer can strike women well before they’re scheduled for their first mammogram.
Cerutti-Jensen, 35, was shocked when she was diagnosed with breast cancer two days before Christmas. At the urging of a friend who kept a similar online illness journal, she soon launched a blog to document her progress.
“It’s been one of the best decisions I’ve made along this journey,” Cerutti-Jensen said via phone last week. “You can feel isolated, and this helps you feel connected.”
The site took only a few minutes to set up using the free Blogger.com service. Since then, Cerutti-Jensen has written about everything from the difficulty she had in obtaining a correct diagnosis to a subsequent mastectomy and the reconstructive procedure she will undergo in the fall.
In addition to keeping well-wishers up to date, the blog has given fellow cancer sufferers an idea of what to expect from the disease.
“It’s been therapeutic for me, my husband and my family to chronicle the challenges and triumphs, and experience this with a community of supportive people,” Cerutti-Jensen said. “I love logging on to see people’s encouraging words.”
She realizes some folks might not wish to share accounts of their illnesses with the world. However, she noted, “Other people who have cancer have created a blog after seeing mine. And some said they wished they’d done it earlier.”
Drilling down
Instead of starting standard blogs, many patients opt to create free sites through CaringBridge.org and CarePages.com. Those services, which so far have hosted about 100,000 blogs combined, allow users to limit access to family and friends. For a good example of an open journal, visit CaringBridge, click on Founder’s Weekly Blog and read the June 13 entry about the site for conjoined twins Isabelle and Abbigail Carlsen.
Vlog update
Shortly after last week’s column on video blogging appeared, top vlog Rocketboom was grounded by host Amanda Congdon’s departure. The site announced plans to introduce an interim host today and said Congdon “has decided to move to L.A. to pursue opportunities that have arisen for her in Hollywood.”
But Congdon alleged she was forced out. “My partner, Andrew Baron, is no longer interested in being my partner,” she said in a video on her Amanda UnBoomed blog.
Congdon then posted her private correspondence with Baron about the split. The tense exchange played like a Web 2.0 version of Time Warner kicking Ted Turner to the curb. It also elicited an offer from Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calcanis for Congdon to host a new vlog on Netscape.
All in all, it might have been her most compelling performance.