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| Happy Birthday To Us |
Please excuse the slightly length entry - I think I can afford to be a little more verbose than usual to mark a year of blogging.
How It All Began
A year ago this week I was at home, very slowly improving, after nearly 5 weeks in hospital which culminated with a CLIPPERS diagnosis. A combination of high-dose steroids and cabin-fever from being at hospital and home meant I could talk about very little else than CLIPPERS (and boy could I talk). There were also a fair few people who wanted to know what was happening and despite my babbling I was getting bored telling them the same story and answering the same questions. So in an effort to save my marriage (by reducing the babbling burden on my lovely wife) and my sanity (by putting down a definitive account of my illness) LIVINGWITHCLIPPERS was born.
At the time I had no idea if I would persevere with it, not least as the diagnostic uncertainty meant there was a small but finite chance I could be dead by Christmas 2011. However I did gradually get better and the emphasis changed from just focussing on my own problems to providing a digest of what CLIPPERS news I could glean from the web.
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| Number of readers of livingwithclippers on a monthly basis |
The readership has naturally ebbed and flowed over time and was initially quite high which I attribute to friends and family finding out what the hell had been going on! (When I say "high" I mean up to 20 visits per day - Rupert Murdoch has little competition from me although he has his own problems to deal with.) After Christmas 2011 the visits declined a little but in recent months there has been much more activity. I think there has been a shift towards people who don't know me personally but have some other interest in CLIPPERS for personal (or maybe even professional) reasons. I have also started to receive emails from fellow sufferers (what are we - CLIPPERS?, CLIPPYS?) from Europe, America and Australia.
Whatever their reasons for visiting, the readers of livingwithclippers are a global community as you can see from the map. (No recorded visits from Greenland yet, but I'm working on that.) And let's be quite clear that you have to want to come here. If you just search for CLIPPERS via Google you are highly likely to find other CLIPPERS before you get here: e.g. a popular basketball team, haircare products, boats, tea-bags etc etc Whatever your reasons for visiting, it's seeing the visits rack up week on week which keeps the blog going - there's nothing worse, at least in blog-land, than feeling you're posting straight to a black hole.
If you're living with CLIPPERS the future is uncertain but there have been some hints in the last year that although the disease is chronic it can often be managed and suppressed, at least in the short-to-medium term. I plan to keep the blog going while there is demand and I have something (hopefully) interesting to say. Maybe a more official support forum will appear at some point but for now you're stuck with my ramblings! But it doesn't all have to come from me. If you have some CLIPPERS news, or a CLIPPERS experience you want to share then send me an email and I'm more than happy to put some guest posts up here. Anyway, thanks for reading and hope to see you next year.
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| Brecon Beacons, South Wales, Summer 2012 |
Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.
Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
