[Debbie L.]

I'm glad to hear you're past this hurdle, Denise.

I think Lani's idea is a great one. Would it be hard to set up a new forum just for treatment details? Someone would have to put together a thread for each procedure, with an intro message of the basic information. People do like to see the official information (NCI/NIH as Lani suggested) but then it always seems we are MORE interested in hearing personal experiences. We could help gather the opening info, if there's someone who could set up the forum.

As long as we have a good variety of experience, the stories from those who had harder times will be balanced out by those who sailed thru, so I don't think it would alarm people. As Lani said, for most of us our imagined version is worse than the reality turns out to be.

Plus, readers will see that the reason the "official" information sometimes seems so vague as to be no information at all is because each person reacts or responds differently -- so it's hard to say what the experience will be like for any one person.

In addition to describing the procedure and the personal experience of same, people could add helpful hints -- things that made it easier or helped with side effects (or didn't help), etc. And for the things that are hard to visualize (head frames and helmets!), photos are great.

Debbie Laxague