Mom blogs through son’s cancer struggle
While keeping people updated on the latest entertainment news and my random thoughts isn’t an uworthy goal, Oklahoma City mom Carrie Black used her blog to deal with her son Ian’s battle with cancer.
Here’s their story, which ran in the “Know It” feature on cancer in Sunday’s The Oklahoman. You can find all the cancer stories at www.newsok.com/news/cancer.
Sharing your story
Blogging options on the Web
“When your 3 ½-year-old tells you that his pee looks like a strawberry slushie, you sit up and take notice.”
Oklahoma City mother Carrie Black vividly recalls the Sunday in July 2005 when she realized something was wrong with her middle child, Ian.
The next day, Ian visited his pediatrician, but by that night, the boy was in the emergency room with abdominal pain caused by a ballooning tumor on his left kidney. He was transferred that Tuesday to Children’s Hospital, where the family learned Ian had Wilms’ tumor, a rare childhood kidney cancer.
When the Blacks arrived at Children’s, volunteers advised Ian’s parents to set up a free personal Web site on CaringBridge.org. Before Ian underwent surgery the next day to remove his left kidney and the tumor, his mom started blogging about his ordeal.
Through her son’s operation, chemotherapy and radiation treatment, Black used the site to keep relatives and friends updated, find other families coping with Wilms’ tumor and air her thoughts.
“It was a good place for me to just kind of vent,” she said.
Ian, now 6, has been off treatment for 26 months, but his mom has kept up his CaringBridge page, recently blogging about his tonsillectomy. His page is at www.caringbridge.org/visit/ianblack.
Last year, she also started www.myspace.com/kidsgetcancertoo. Her blog there is a personal outreach project to offer support and information regarding childhood cancers.
Other blogging options:
- www.carepages.com: Free, personalized Web sites for people dealing with serious illnesses or injuries.
- www.blogforacure.com: Free personal blogs in a huge community of cancer survivors supporting each other.
- www.medicineworld.org/cancer/cancer-blogs-list.html: A home page to many different cancer blogs.
- www.healthcentral.com/breast-cancer/weblogs.html: A collection of breast cancer survivors’ blogs.
- www.redtoenail.org: Free personal blogs in an online community for people with cancer.
Cancer message boards:
- http://myplanet.planetcancer.org/forum: Provides a support community and place to discuss different issues for young cancer survivors.
- www.cancercompass.com/message-board.htm: Links to several different cancer-related boards, including ones dealing with specific types of cancer, treatments and prevention.
- www.mdanderson.org/topics/survivorship: Click on “Cancer Survivor Message Board” link to go to a secure message board for cancer survivors and caregivers to share concerns about how cancer has affected their lives.
-BAM
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Pathology.org is awarding you as top resource and if you would like to get the banner, please email me back with the subject line as your URL to avoid Spam and also to make sure that you only get the banner.
watching the football games and getting the house together. My aunt Jina and uncle stevie came over along with jamiee and steven today.
The Australian and Northern Territory Governments have reached another key milestone in the development of the Radiation Oncology Unit (ROU) with the announcement of Royal Adelaide Hospital as the preferred provider