Crowdsourcing Cancer Support: A Love Story

Cancer care and support is changing dramatically as blogging, social media, facebook and mmo gaming become mass media. Trisha Creekmore, aka Tinkerhell, a mother, wife and digital denizen since 1995, has had breast cancer twice. The first diagnosis in 2004 was hard and lonely. The second diagnosis in 2010 was harder, but not lonely. Trisha and her husband David found the content on health Web sites unhelpful and online disease-specific support groups depressing. So they made up their own plan, harnessing the power of facebook, the mmo Warhammer and thousands of strangers to create Cancerpalooza. David blogged every week. His plan was to keep family and friends informed, but the blog and the community it created became much more than the sum of their parts, inspiring and bringing value to complete strangers, the entire mmorpg community and even rockstars like Mike Patton and Ozzy Osbourne. But not in an annoying social-media-positive-sharing way. More in a FML-WTF-LOL way. This Future of Health Track is sponsored by Aetna.