Web logs providing aid for sick people

Blogging is transforming the way some people deal with illness.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
When Dan Rahenkamp learned he might die, he reached for a keyboard.
"Welcome to my blog about my travels down the trail of treatment for my prostate cancer," wrote Rahenkamp, a middle school teacher in Tampa Bay, Fla., and author of the blog "Any Day Above Ground Is a Good One."
Rahenkamp, 44, is still a little surprised that he started a Web log after his diagnosis Oct. 31. He was never much of a writer, he said, nor did he ever record his thoughts in diaries.
"At first it was just to clear my head," he recalled. "Your mind gets cloudy when you get diagnosed, so you don't want to forget all the things you're hearing -- and so you start to write them down. ... But then it turned into something more."
What's the goal?
Rahenkamp, who now attracts a readership of 40,000, is part of a growing subgroup of bloggers who write about their illnesses. The reasons for creating such blogs vary -- from the need to efficiently update family and friends about one's health to the desire to share stories about medical treatments with fellow sufferers. But for many so-called sick bloggers, a primary aim is to achieve an emotional catharsis by writing and disseminating their thoughts online.
Arthur W. Frank, a sociology professor at University of Calgary who has studied the history of "illness narratives" and has written a book titled "Wounded Storytellers," says the instinct to share one's sickness is an age-old tradition but one that is being recast because of the Internet.
"In this case, the medium really is the message," Frank said. "The Internet is a support group available 24 hours, at your convenience, from all parts of the world. You can stay up late at night and find that one other person in the whole world who has the same exact rare form of cancer as you -- and imagine how moving that feels when you find that person."
A large community
Two Web sites, carepages.com and caringbridge.org, which host more formal "patient pages" through hospitals, recently reported a combined increase from 46,000 personal sites to 95,000 in the past year. Unlike sick blogs, patient pages are monitored by Webmasters, but most serve the same purpose as their blogging counterparts: to publicly chronicle ailments.
Derek Gordon, marketing director of the San Francisco-based blog search engine Technorati.com, said the total number of patient blogs is impossible to determine. But the blogosphere, he said, has doubled every six months for two years and is up to 43 million sites, including bloggers who self-identify their sites with keywords as illness or survivor.
"You could call it a new grief ritual," said Victoria Pitts, an assistant sociology professor at City University of New York, who authored a 2004 study about breast-cancer patients inspired to start personal Web sites. "These people have created a new personal narrative to their illness, which goes beyond the health protocols they might have found on WebMD. ... But whether it's helping their recovery is still speculative. It's certainly transformed it."
That transformation is being experienced by bloggers such as Jeannette Vagnozzi, a 41-year-old resident of La Verne, Calif., who writes about her breast cancer on 2hands.blogspot.com.
Vagnozzi set up her site seven days after she received her diagnosis. Initially, she had turned to the Internet in a frantic hunt for information about her ailment. Then, like many cancer bloggers, she felt frustrated by a lack of reliable medical information sites. And she was inundated by well-intentioned friends and family members inquiring about her condition. In the frenzy, Vagnozzi posted her blog to satisfy the influx of personal queries and to create an info-portal for other cancer patients.
"It gets hard to tell your story over and over again," Vagnozzi said. "It was easier for me to say to people, 'Log on, and see where I'm at.'"