Online posts help cancer patient share feelings

By Gina Kim
gkim@sacbee.com

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SACRAMENTO -- Jessica Lum announced she had cancer -- on Facebook.

Her close friends and family already knew, but it just seemed easier for the 21-year-old to get word to everyone else -- the more than 1,000 friends she has on the social networking Web site -- in one note titled, "I have Cancer + 10 questions you might ask."

The answer to her first question: "No, I'm not joking. Why would I joke about something like this?"

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Since that post on Christmas Day, Lum has shared the status of her deteriorating hip and liver. She has written about her treatments and the stylish shortcomings of hospital gowns. She questions life and death. And she does it in an online style of honesty mixed with humor and sarcasm.

"It's a nice way to give updates instead of having to talk about it over and over again individually," she explained. "Plus, it's hard for a lot of my friends to really know what to say."

Increasingly, people with cancer and other serious illnesses are using blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook to announce that they are sick and offer updates on their conditions.

Relatives and friends are logging their support on sites such as CarePages.

The sites give patients a cathartic way to share their changing emotions.

"Some want to acknowledge that they have cancer and that they're stronger than the disease," said Marlene von Friederichs-Fitzwater, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine, who researches young adults with cancer. "There's a kind of public recognition about it that gives them strength that empowers them."

Lum had just gotten home from UCLA on Christmas break last year when she got the cancer diagnosis. She said she found herself at the keyboard of her MacBook Pro, typing a note to her Facebook friends with the news. It made it real to her, she said.

Facebook is where Lum has documented much of her life since leaving Sacramento for Los Angeles. She posted photos from the first football games of freshman year. There are pictures of her taking pictures, while working at the college newspaper. There are road trips to San Diego, Salt Lake City and Pink's hot dogs.

Diagnosed with rare form of cancer

Last fall, at the start of her senior year, Lum couldn't shake a chest cold.

The English major squeezed a doctor's visit into her schedule. While there, she offhandedly mentioned a swelling she'd noticed on her stomach.

The cold went away. But the bump -- a tumor the size of a grapefruit -- turned out to be metastatic pheochromocytoma, a rare cancer for which there is no established cure. And Lum was in Stage 4, meaning the cancer was growing quickly.

Lum moved home to Sacramento. The hardest part of coming home and giving up school, snowboarding and beer, she said, was that she felt fine.

In a Jan. 7 posting, a couple of weeks after her diagnosis, she wrote: "If I get irradiated in my hip area, I get some cool X-shaped tats to take away from it all. I've always said I wanted a tattoo." The radiation therapy and a round of chemo in March began to take their toll.

"To be perfectly honest, I hate the situation I'm in," she wrote on a blog that she keeps in addition to her Facebook page. "I'm dying. No matter what I do, the truth is, I'm dying. This cancer will most likely kill me, a few years down the road, maybe sooner."

Generational comfort

The comfort of sharing such private feelings on a public platform is largely generational, said Jesse Drew, director of the technocultural studies program at UC Davis.