We ask ourselves, how can we make our website better? How can we help each other more? We seem to listen all right and well enough. I think we need to trust and hear our psycho-oncology voices as authentic and meaningful reflections of our personal and profound human experiences with malignancy. We can at times be silly and giggle, and kid around and cajole. A serious and somber group like ours sometimes needs that too - to lighten the load we carry. Our concerns, however, are genuine. They can become very heavy as we read each other’s posts. We are neither test tubes nor laboratory animals with cancer. Our Voices of GIST are sincere and serious records of our human journeys with GIST.

How can we clarify our voices? Our daily posts and archives contain numerous psycho-oncology items and issues. Unfortunately, their psycho-oncology content has been too often scattered, and sometimes lost among our many messages and few personal essays. We need to find a label for our spontaneous psycho-oncology posts, and a designated GSI page on which they may reside and be found. That is what we have been asked to do here.

Why Not PSI-ONC?

What name or designation or name might we use for our psycho-oncology Page? We need to be comfortable with the words we use. Toward that end, I would like our psycho-oncology web Page to be friendly, not too techie - serious, perhaps somber at times, but not gloomy.

I believe we ought to feel free to sound off about psychology, our thoughts and feelings, and certainly not be intimidated by fancy theories, authoritarian big shots, or each other. What kind of an easy label for our psycho-oncology posts might reflect some of that that? I think we need a short and easy label because psycho-oncology is a big mouthful - almost as big a mouthful as immunohistochemical staining, for example.

As protein molecules and their chemical compounds seem to get longer and longer, we increasingly use acronyms in medical and scientific conversation, until they even become part of our lay language - like DNA for deoxynucleic acid. Why not PSI-ONC for psycho-oncology? Besides, I like the way PSI-ONC sounds. Pronounced “sigh-onk” it kind of reminds me, in some ways of us, and some of our posts. No? Well, indulge me. In any event, PSI-ONC can nicely serve as a short lead-label or designation in the Subject Line of our psycho-oncology posts. Or just a plain PO might be an even shorter PSI-ONC tag if our website guru prefers.