A blogger to the end

Last October, I wrote that patients (from Hell or elsewhere) have a new e-resource in the many patient blogs available on the internet ( Dead serious blogging, 21 October 2009 ). I found these very useful this time last year, when I was having unpleasant side-effects from surgery, which the doctors could not fully explain. The blogs did. At the time, I noticed the waves of support the sufferers got from fellow sufferers. It is this social contribution by the internet that I believe makes the experience of cancer and any life-threatening disease more tolerable. I have in the last two months had the privilege to read the day-to-day blogging of Guy Kewney ( link ), who I hardly knew but always considered the best technology journalist of his age – from the late 1970s onwards. He died on 8 April from bowel cancer, which had spread to his liver, 16 months after his first acute symptoms in December 2008. His last entry was on 29 March. The blog covers everything: detailed descriptions of the treatment he received, his reactions to successive waves of bad news, the interludes of hope, his thoughts about death, his love for his family, black jokes with blogging friends, his fear and anger, his "guilt about having 'made people love me' when I'm going to betray them by leaving". And every now and again he reverts to tech-journo mode with great anger against Facebook for changing its privacy rules, or an attack on DAB. Throughout, Guy writes with wit and brilliance, despite great pain in handling a keyboard. His attitude to his doctors and the NHS is more tolerant than mine. But at times his patience gets frayed with the bureaucracy. After one cock-up involving a stent and a Picc (peripherally inserted catheter), he sums up his feelings as "the NHS; great in dealing with emergencies. Great at making an emergency out of any routine organisational challenge, but not good at dealing with that. I REALLY don't need this." My view exactly. In my view – and Guy's – it took too long, from December 2008 to March 2009, to diagnose Guy's condition and to start him on chemotherapy, but from then on I am impressed how rapidly the medical teams in the Whittington and University College London hospitals reacted to his symptoms. I ask myself whether this alacrity might have been because Guy Googled every twist and turn in his condition, and then turned his knowledge on the doctors. They had nowhere to hide. I recommend Guy's blog as great literature – John Diamond with added medical details. Because of the nature of his cancer, his graphic descriptions are not for the squeamish, dealing largely with the consistency and colour of his poo and wee. But, to me, the up-moments outdo the pain. On the 5 March, he finished his blog with a smiley, which said Pure Happiness. His last post finished with "Content". When, on 1 March Guy admitted on the blog that he had given up hope, David Tebbutt, a colleague and friend, created a website asking for fellow journalists to email in their memories of Guy ( link ). They did so, from all over the world, giving an extra dimension. Guy read it for the next 37 days, and responded. David had turned Guy into a "social object", a description he might have relished. David Tebbutt concluded his obituary for Guy: "No-one can predict where the connections will lead or what the contributions will reveal. For me, and many others who got swept up in the Guy Kewney story, it has provided more enlightenment and understanding than any amount of conventional communication could have achieved." I wonder whether the doctors read Guy's blog – and other similar cancer blogs. They would learn a lot.