Last month I was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor. Since then, after the initial shock and adjustment to a new health condition, I've been the fortunate recipient of excellent medical care, tremendous support from friends and family, and so far at least, pretty mild reactions to chemotherapy and radiation treatments. I've been strong and well enough to go on a 10 mile day hike this past Sunday, up to Vesper Peak in the North Cascades with great friends. I've been resting a bit more than usual, and I'm still getting a goodly bit of work done. All in all I feel pretty good. My support network has more than 40 strong members helping provide me with delicious food, moral support, kindness, honesty, wisdom, humor, and much more. So, I'm getting the support I need, and I'll be sure to ask for what I need as I make my way through this unexpected adventure. If you would like to join my support community, let me know how you'd like to help.
Building and deploying my support community has been a great case study in using a social network and technology to solve real problems. After some great advice and counseling from Cancer Lifeline, my wife Adrienne and I, with help from several key friends, held a support meeting, based on the share the care model, to invite people to help out on project PhilCare. Beginning cancer treatment is a high dive into unknowability, where you can't and don't know how much support you will need. Friends and family worry and want to help, and as the cancer patient, you're beset with enormous new decisions to make and an overwhelming number of new tasks and priorities, as well as with the potential of being pretty darn sick. To manage this, I set up a wiki to manage all the new information I was getting from many sources, to provide updates to the group, to list and request help with tasks, to divide support tasks so they distribute the load across my network, and to facilitate input from my community, all of which has allowed me to focus intensively on my well-being. The wiki has been incredibly helpful (big thanks to www.socialtext.com ). My clients have also been very understanding in this time, for which I'm also very thankful. I'll provide more details along the way, especially as I'd like to highlight how web 2.0 and tools like wikis can transform seemingly overwhelming challenges into perfectly viable projects. Through the wiki, the support, concern and worry of friends, family, and colleagues is channelled and converted into small actions that make a difference.