When she insisted that I absolutely MUST have a flipcam, my friend and partner in what can we think up next, Connie Reece, was sure that I needed to do it to show people what it was really like to live with cancer.
Holy cats, Connie, I was thinking. This is just not something I'm comfortable doing. But do it I did, and am, and now it's not so strange anymore. I'll get better with it.
One of the reasons why I'll get better at it is reading people's reactions. They make me know I need to keep on keeping on.
"I now consider someone like Susan Reynolds. . . . totally appreciate her willingness to share her "hard" times, as well as those days when she is full of energy and hope. I can handle a hard day, just like she can. It gives me strength to face the "strange" and "sad" stuff just watching her whip out her new video cam and have the sheer guts to look us in the face and say: "I'm not doing so well today...". Girl, you give me a gift, every time you do that!
I don't really know the blogger who calls herself CyberGal except via a few conversations on twitter or her Blog. But I hear what she's saying when she wrote that because I could say the same thing about other people at different stages of my life.
So if what I do is helpful to one person I'll try to get better at it by doing it more often.
It feels silly sometimes. Like I'm taking it all too seriously. But I'll have to find a way that works for me and might be helpful to someone else along the way. That seems to be a hard path for me to find comfortable.
I've got a flipcam, and I think it's a great idea to record things that are happening to you, because it's a way of dealing with them. And sharing is phenomenal for the next person. Just today I got an email from a woman who said she "devoured" my hip replacement blog because she was having her own hip replaced next month. So you can image how much you help other cancer survivors.
Posted by: francine hardaway | Feb 27, 2008 at 09:26 PM