The floowing article by Cheryl Tan is from the Sunday Times dated 23 Jan 2011.
Healing Blogs
When Madam Joanne Poon started a blog three years ago to celebrate the birth of her first child, she did not expect it to turn into an online journal chronicling her daughter's fight against cancer.
Last June, doctors at National University Hospital diagnosed 31/2-year-old toddler Maeve as suffering from Burkitt's lymphoma, a rare and aggressive - albeit, curable - form of cancer of the lymph nodes.
Madam Poon, a 36-year-old housewife married to teacher Bernard Low, 38, recalls: 'I couldn't show Maeve that I was scared and nervous and I couldn't cry about it in front of her, either.'
Updating her blog Maevie Baby! (www.maeviebaby.blogspot.com) became a way for the mum to unleash the pent-up fears and frustration about her daughter's condition.
'Writing really helped me get everything out of the system,' says Madam Poon, who also has a younger daughter Paige, who is 10 months old.
Keeping a blog has become a high-tech way of coping with illness or trauma, with hundreds of people around the world sharing details of their medical conditions or a loved one's online every day.
For instance, The Knock On Effect, the blog of 18-year-old Rosie Kilburn from Birmingham who has cancer, has received 121,197 hits so far and even spawned a shop selling T-shirts to help raise funds for cancer research.
Admittedly, such blogs by Singaporeans are relatively uncommon, compared to the proliferation of websites such as CaringBridge.org in the United States.
The Minnesota-based website is a non-profit organisation that allows people suffering from a chronic illness to set up blogs for free on their website. It is open to anyone worldwide and helps patients keep their friends and family overseas updated about their condition.
According to CaringBridge's online profile, half a million people connect through the site each day, with more than one billion visits to its users' personal websites so far.
While blogging offers a sense of control over one's life - something some patients may sorely miss - as well as give rise to encouragement from fellow sufferers from other corners of the globe, public sharing on the Internet is not actively encouraged as part of a patient's psychiatric treatment.
Raffles Hospital specialist in psychiatry, associate professor Munidasa Winslow, says writing is a good way for patients to confront their feelings, instead of bottling them up.
However, he cautions bloggers against 'revealing too much as the Internet is not a safe place unless the blog is secured'.
National Cancer Centre's head of psychosocial oncology department, Dr Gilbert Fan, explains that such blogs may draw opportunists selling all sorts of products or cures or less constructive remarks by readers that could demoralise a person.
'Bloggers need to be open-minded and emotionally stable to handle both positive and negative remarks,' he says.
Three months ago, little cancer patient Maeve was finally given the all-clear after intense chemotherapy.
Madam Poon has stopped blogging temporarily as the family has 'been too busy playing and catching up with the things we promised her we'd do' but will eventually update the blog for the benefit of friends overseas.
As for showing Maeve the blog, she says it will have to be much later when the girl is in her teens and better able to understand mum's emotional blog entries.
Below are three other people who find comfort in blogging.
HL123's note:They will shown in another posting of HL123
Yes it helps to speak out when the heart is heavy and in such cases when you write about how brave you have been through a disease there are millions who are also benefited in the process.
ReplyDeleteNot everyone heals & recovers from their illnesses. The other 'less travelled road', not encountered by many, is when you grieve for a love lost, especially when you have lost a child through an illness, its sheer anguish! The bigger picture - Healing blogs can take the form of grieving blogs too.
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