Small world

I'm slowly getting caught up on telling people about my cancer. Short of taking ads out in L'Independent, Tribune de Genève, Boston Globe it is both a slow and fast process. I do not want to put it on facebook, but I've no problems referring this site on my other expatwriter blog.

My housemate points out the alternative way to deal with it would have been to tell no one, but then again if I had friends with breast cancer I would want to know if only to give them a hug and hopefully anything else I could do, although their wishes in that case would supersede mine. In any case it is a lousy way to get attention from your friends, but then again, my friends and I've shared much over the years.

A telephone call from my best friend since high school brought real joy. We had shared so much negativity at one period that when things were going well for both of us, and we hadn't talked, she called to remind me we were more than FOUL weather friends.

The way the word is spreading could make for a communication dissertation. Today I got an email from one of my online writing friends, a woman I've never met but talked to on the phone. In the group are people from the UK, US, Germany, Israel, Switzerland, France.

How had she heard? She had been at a workshop in the States led by the founder and spirit of the Geneva Writers Group. I had told her she would be inspired and she was so the message was two fold...one about me and one about the wonderful workshop.

And in the emails I've been getting, the phone conversations concerning Cammy Beck which is the name given to those little suckers by my housemate and I after a discussion that some year we will have a moratorium on the words cancer and oncologist not just for me but for all our friends and family who've shared the same experience.

The realization that in the four houses in my immediate neighbourhood with eight adults, there have been six cases of cancer is a bit daunting. I don't think it is like the W.R. Grace in Woburn years ago for there is no factory dumping chemicals. It is just a reminder that what I'm going through is shared by more people than it should be.