My friend Jane Hascall’s husband Benny, who is only 60, suffered a stroke on December 6th. Fortunately he is recovering at one of Colorado’s finest rehab facilities, the Craig Rehabilitation Center in Englewood, CO. With the assistance of Benny’s daughter, Katie, Jane utilized one of that facilities’ excellent services to create a web site where she posts updates on his condition. That way, his friends and relatives can be kept current about his progress by subscribing to those updates or just by periodically visiting the site. This solution is so much better than Jane’s having to send out periodic emails to a distribution list.
This use of the Internet to deal with an illness like this is another example, I think, of the way being connected as we are nowadays can make our lives better. For all the spam, phishing scams, viruses, trojans, and predators that may infest the Internet, uses such as this help to illustrate the good that can come from being online. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Jane is an excellent writer so her posts about his progress are very readable and interesting.
Though I doubt that Jane thinks of this as blogging, that is certainly what it is. In a message to me recently she commented that “It was easy to set up and even easier to update.” I suspect that many people think of blogging as too complex and perhaps too geeky for “ordinary” people to do, but as Jane’s experience attests it is quite easy, and the learning curve isn’t all that steep. As time goes on, I believe more and more people will get their feet wet because of some experience like this and that they’ll find that producing content on the Internet is much more fun and useful than just consuming it.
Update: I stand corrected. As Jane points out in her comment, the web site she set up and to which she posts updates is not affiliated with the Craig Rehabilitation Center but is instead run by CaringBridge.