The Heal Blog

“Courage consists of the power of self-recovery” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have personally never battled with something as monumentous as cancer. Those who manage to battle with cancer and still live their lives gives me something to believe in. Survivors that grow from the experience, those who can still have hope, they are the people that define the term heroism. For me, those who I loved that battled cancer, they are my heroes, they taught me what courage is all about.

The effects of cancer are life altering, not just for the patient, but their families and their friends. This disease isn’t something that people can just recover from, the healing process is with them from the day they go into remission. My class was given the assignment to research websites and blogs regarding survivorship of cancer so we can create a blog for our client, Cure Magazine.

I embarked on this assignment rather hesitantly, cancer has been a significant part in my life through the illnesses of family and loved ones, but actually dealing with the aftermath of the disease never really occurred. I internalized all my feelings and emotions, all the pain and anxiety I just harbored within myself. I guess looking back I felt that since it wasn’t my sickness I just had to cope with my pain, it was something to deal with later, all my attentions had to go to those I loved. So the idea of Heal Magazine, a magazine geared to survivors of cancer and to helping them with the healing after chemo, was a rather foreign concept.

How do cancer survivors begin the healing process? Is there a place for family and loved ones within that process, how do they fit in? As I began my research I found less pain, and so much hope. Hope for a cure, hope for the future, and hope that their stories might help others. To begin listing blogs or communities that dialogue regarding cancer and survivorship would take pages, but there were a few I found that really caught my attention. The Cancer Blog (www.thecancerblog.com), Breast Cancer Treatement (www.breatcancer-treatment.us) which is one woman’s blog regarding her story with breast cancer and how she is surviving, and Cancer Story (www.cancerstory.com) an amazing website that is very extensive, are all geared toward helping people perservered through cancer.

Breast Cancer Support (bcsupport.org) is another great site for breast cancer sufferers and survivors to go and listen to other stories. Steps For Living (stepsforliving.com) is a great site geared toward younger patients or survivors of cancer, for those who think “I’m too young for this” Gilda’s Club (gildasclub.com), Race For the Cure(cms.komen.org) and LiveStrong (livestrong.org) are sites that serve to educate and motivate people regarding cancer.. I believe these sites should be referenced or linked in the blog for Cure Magazine because they really seem to honestly reflect the feelings and fears regarding cancer, and I believe that they could really help someone in their own struggle with the healing process.

A few ideas for a sidebar for the Heal blog would be places for families to have an opportunity to share their stories and how they coped. Another relevant sidebar blog topic is Cancer Fundraisers. People should be fully aware of all of the strides being made to find a cure and ways that they can get involved; example would be dates for Race for the Cure in local neighborhoods. A third sidebar topic, a perhaps the most important one, would be testimonials, a place where survivors can go and share their stories with others and give and receive feedback.

In regards to the focus of Heal’s blog, I believe that it should really be focused primarily on survivorship. How people start living their lives after the battle with cancer is fought. I think it should be an uplifting site and one that continues to instill hope, and not be constantly reminding them of their treatment, but focus their goals on maintaining health.

After all this research I am really excited to start this project with my class, so please check back and see how it develops!