Weekly Round Up

At last, I am settling into some kind of routine. It took a while to find somewhere to live, get connected with internet and get back to the blog again. So what’s been happening in the blogsphere since I last dipped in? Let’s take a look and see.

“October on the breast cancer blogosphere has often been tense and as we step gently into November I feel a release of that tension” so writes Phillipa on her blog at the start of this month. She makes some excellent points about Pinktober and brings the focus on a different kind of awareness from her own unique perspective.

However, I am not sure the blogosphere is ever without its tensions, and this time the debate centers around Amy Robach, an anchor on Good Morning America, who was diagnosed with breast cancer following a live, on-air mammogram last month. It has sparked a heated debate on what the Pink Underbelly calls ” the rampant, panacea-esque assumption that routine mammograms save lives”. Routine mammography is a hotly debated topic and the evidence can be confusing, but Nancy does a terrific job of presenting the current research and delving behind the celebrity endorsement.  Katie takes up the theme and shares a link to Dr Susan Love’s post on the lessons to be learned from Amy Robach’s breast cancer diagnosis, while Gayle Sulik writes of how “Amy Robach’s on-air mammogram and public reveal mirror breast cancer’s false narrative that “Every cancer is curable as long as you catch it in time.”

Remember that feeling of shock and disbelief that you felt when you first heard the words you have cancer? It’s a common reaction on receiving a diagnosis of any life-changing disease as Carolyn Thomas so brilliantly demonstrates in her latest post entitled, “I went from the driver’s seat of my life to the trunk” (a quote from Medical X speaker, Jamia Crockett on being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis). Jamia struggled with being a patient and all that this implies – a familiar feeling to so many of us, who in the words of Chris (writing about isolation) go from being a person in our own right to being seen  as our disease.

The theme of healing resonated with me when reading  Nancy’s and  Catherine’s  latest blogs and Audrey’s experience of the The Wellness Enhancement Learning (WEL) Programme. I am grateful to Audrey from sharing a link to the website with lots of great information. A recommendation from Audrey  is well worth checking out and I am looking forward to exploring the website in more detail later this week. Healing of another kind is taking place on Elizabeth’s blog, as she is finding her way towards a better night’s sleep. Insomnia and sleep difficulties are one of the more irksome side effects of cancer treatment and its sequalae and lack of sleep really effects your quality of life and ability to cope.

This is just a small snapshot of what you have been writing about recently. I haven’t had a chance to read as many of your blogs as I would like, so please do leave a link to a post you have written which I may have missed and you would like to share with readers.

Until next week.

Yours with love

Marie xxx