Sharing the Struggle: To Blog or Not to Blog Publicly?

I started and abandoned a public blog called, "Anal Cancer is Really Shitty." Pardon the bad language. It's not the way I talk in everyday conversation, but I'm quite annoyed, often, to be living with an ostomy now. But at least I am living. They told me it would be better to be alive with an ostomy than to endure the long and grueling death by anal cancer... which, the doc said, would eat away my anal orifice until I had a gaping hole through which excrement would continually flow, as would blood and mucus, and I'd be in horrible pain, until the bitter end.

So... I suppose I should be grateful for what must have been a lesser pain-- recovering from surgery, having an abscess where my anus used to be, barely being able to sit more than a few minutes at a time, for months...

And of course... there had been the horrible ordeal of the blowtorch to my ass... oops... I mean, the radiation to shrink the tumor before surgery.

I was going to blog all about it... but I can't. I can't inflict on the general public things they don't need to know.

Here, it might make more sense, but then... we all have our suffering to bear... and who really wants to read about anyone else's? Do you? Do you blog about yours? Or do you feel like it's too intimate, too personal, and too awful to share about the ordeal of whatever disease or accident occasioned your ostomy?

I have to quit typing for now. I'm invited to a free movie... a movie I'd never make it to, if I were still working my "day job".

I'm doing some acting gigs. I need to get a lot more work... at a higher pay rate. Fast! Unemployment compensation will run out soon.

Best of luck to all of you. Let me know what you think about a public blog revealing too much information and lots of ugly emotions... along with a little humor and some optimism, on occasion.

Of course, your feelings are a normal reaction to what many of us have endured. I am going to post a link to a poem I wrote. Mine is the 2nd poem in the thread. I think it shows the 2 separate directions you can take post-op: you can feel a bit sorry for yourself or you can celebrate cheating death. To me, there is no sweeter victory.

http://www.meetanostomate.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=297

I think if there is any place to post about your feelings, this is the place. Most of us have felt down and sometimes 'out', we all also feel the 'sweet victory' of getting another chance at life. My life is way better now that I am not suffering with UC. I still get a little down and look for inspiration and reminders of how lucky I am to be here.
Also, if we don't like it, we won't read it.

You never know where a post on here could lead you.

I blogged about my treatment. Radiation isn't a blowtorch, it's a sunburn. On both sides, it was more to keep those interested apprised of what was going on with me, and it kept phone calls down to a minimum.

I do like your title though. But then again, I come from the gutters of Brooklyn, NY.

Hi Wondering If - I hope you will reconsider the idea of not telling your story about anal cancer, treatment, and the subsequent problems involved. Anal (and rectal) cancers have become much more prevalent in younger folks (middle age) in general and women in particular. I attend a gastrointestinal cancer support group in San Diego, and the women there with anal cancer are really going through a difficult time. I felt very saddened by Farrah Fawcett's case of anal cancer - first that she shunned treatment that could have saved her life, and then that she didn't want to talk about having anal cancer until that oaf Ryan O'Neal "announced" it to the world. People will watch the most horrific stuff in movies and never bat an eye, but don't want to hear about a person's real suffering? I say tough shit! :D

Thanks for sharing your poem. Good stuff. Yes, this is a good place to blog about it...we have relative anonymity, and a prospective employer won't find this blog by Googling me. They will find my "Anal Cancer is Really Shitty" blog. But since it's out there, I may as well continue it.

I just worked on a movie shoot today, where both of the wardrobe techs were cancer survivors, and they were only in their 20's. Stunning. They look so beautiful and healthy now. It gave me hope. The young man has survived six years, and he had had cancer in many vital organs. The girl had just a skin level tumor, but it had been large and painful.

And sinfulsot, I love your name... and thanks for appreciating my title. Radiation might have been sunburn for you, but it was a blowtorch for me. I lay on the floor and looked at my ass in the full-length mirror one day, and it definitely looked like someone took a torch to it. There was blackened, scorched flesh. And when they went in to do the subsequent surgery, radiation had fused my vagina to my rectum and rectum to my spine. The surgeon tore a hole in my vagina, trying to separate it from the rectum, and though a gynecologist who was on hand to rip out my ovaries attempted to repair the hole, it tore open, and fluid from a huge abscess poured out of it for weeks, and then huge clots and blood poured out of it, and after that tapered off, it began draining thick, green pus that smelled like chicken soup. It was full of E. coli. Eventually, they admitted me to the hospital to have a drain inserted. After ten days of walking around with a tube hanging off my buttock and a bag taped to my ankle... I finally had some relief from the anal pain, and I could sit again. I had been unable to do so comfortably for about six months.

Okay... I'm now going to watch a tape of Obama at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Mahalo.