My voice is that of a medical doctor, a psychiatric specialist, who has been both nurtured and informed by the voices of GIST during the four years that I have been a patient sustained on Gleevec. As I have learned an abundance of things from my own patients in the past, so have I continued to learn from the generous and freely-shared posts of our fellow GISTmates.

Like each of you, I have much to lose in my battle with GIST. Unlike too many of you, however, I have already been blessed with a long life and a fortunate one that makes me realize how very cruel is cancer, or any similar misfortune, at a younger age. Cancer, like nature itself, is capricious, and I have reluctantly concluded that there is little prospect of my ever finding out why life is so unfair.

The injustice of our human existence is unfathomable. If there is ever an accounting, and should I get there before you, I shall demand on our behalf an explanation and perhaps reparations, especially for our young cancer victims and their distraught families. Why do I tell you these things? Because that human sense of injustice, that outrage, is part of our psycho-oncology too. Where can we learn more about our psycho-oncology?

Our Posts Are Our Voices

The Voices of GIST are our posts that can be found daily, and in our Archives. They tell us much concerning our human experiences with this sarcoma and about the psycho-oncology of our GIST that cannot be found in textbooks or formal studies.

Many of our posts are simple but generous exchanges of information about GIST itself, reports of clinical studies, technical information, or merely accounts of each other's ongoing medical findings and concerns. These are essentially shared informational posts that rapidly build bonds of trust between cyberspace peers in varying degrees of perceived jeopardy.

Our posts reveal a sustained, sincere and genuine interest in each other's problems and progress, and include as well frequent offerings of well-intentioned, informed and often helpful, suggestions. What strikes me as remarkable is that we so frequently share in our quite spontaneous and entirely voluntary posts our very personal circumstances and human concerns about the emotionally stressful experiences that are the very subject matter and essential concerns of psycho-oncology. So what is going on here?