I keep careful track of what draws an audience here–and what doesn’t.
The ongoing series on the Business of Cancer I think of as being important. There are thousands of charities in this country vying for the very limited funds available from private donors. There are hundreds of cancer charities. There are dozens of cancer charities working to fund research. There are barely a handful with any interest in NET/CS–and only three are actively funding research focussed exclusively on the cancer that killed my wife that I have been able to find so far.
The series is aimed, however, not just at NET/CS charities. I
worry about cancer generally. As I have written here before I feel like a magnet for cancer. I am surrounded by people who are fighting this–and who are all more likely to die from it than from something else. I think it is important for people to make their donations wisely and I want to provide the information to make those choices in a form that is a bit more accessible than Charity Navigator can provide.
Yet only 8-10 people a day have looked at what I have written on the subject in the 48 hours after each post. And the numbers after that fall off precipitously.
Posts about new treatments and links to conferences and articles don’t generate much traffic either–though arguably those links are the most valuable things here–especially for those who have the disease, lay caregivers, and medical professionals. That has begun to change some in the last two weeks as more and more of those folks have discovered this site thanks to work the design group has done on SEO things I don’t entirely understand.
The biggest traffic driver is when I write about what Jane went through with the disease–and what I am going through as I struggle with adjusting to losing her. I hope the interest is driven by people trying to find ways to deal with their own losses–their own struggles. I have always been of the opinion that intelligence is learning from your own experiences–and that wisdom is learning from the experiences of others.
But we also live in a culture that is increasingly starved for real experience and real emotion. The closest most people come to a battlefield is “Call of Duty” or some other video game. The closest they come to love is what they see on television or on film. Fifty percent of the population never sees what a real marriage is about because at the first sign of a problem a couple files for divorce. The result is kids have no real vision of how a marriage works.
What I felt about Jane–how I still feel about her–is impossible to describe except with the abstract term of unconditional love–which tells no one anything.
But the stories I tell here perhaps help people conceive of what that term really means.
I started this piece because I wanted to complain about people being more interested in the raw emotion than in the hard facts of fighting this disease. But we all have to remember that we are emotional creatures–and that learning to deal with those emotions is every bit as important in fighting this disease as where to put your money or what medical treatments are available.
