ONCE WORD GOT out at home about what happened to Mary Elizabeth, I started getting more and more emails of support and inquiry about her condition. I was mainly using my blackberry, so found myself keying in the same message over and over and it struck me that I needed some better way of communicating with the hundreds of people back home who were clamoring for more information.

I didn’t have much experience with blogs, but a few of my friends had them and from what I knew it seemed like a good way to stay in touch with a large group of people.  So when we got back from the concert in St. John’s Wood, I sat down at my laptop and started to learn about blogs.  The first thing I had to choose was a name for the blog and an image. I wanted to convey a positive message, but keep it real without getting too arty or philosophical, so I settled on Get Better Mary Elizabeth. It would also be memorable enough for people to key in by memory. I had a few images on the camera from our trip to the London Eye, so I picked one with Mary Elizabeth and Charlotte in the frame, with the Houses of Parliament in the background.

I wrote five posts to cover the beginning of our trip to the present day and emailed the link to a few friends first to ask their opinion and whether they thought it was a good idea.  I was concerned about privacy and about being too out there, but my friends’ positive responses made me feel more confident about posting.

So I published the first five posts and Get Better Mary Elizabeth was born.  The blog would become a daily devotion of mine, part of my routine when I got home from the hospital, which was usually around 10pm.  This coincided with dinner time in New York, so people started to anticipate the daily posts and would respond very quickly.

While I began the blog as a way to keep people updated and save me the trouble of typing the same email out again and again, it soon became an undeniable connection with home. After each post I would receive dozens of comments and responses – some as simple as “hang in there” and others more moving and complex. As the days wore on, I became aware that more and more people were looking at the blog. As a marketing professional, it would be disingenuous of me to say that I didn’t pay attention to how many people visited and commented on the blog. In December, I had 21,000 visits to the blog, with January’s visits up to 22,000. In the four years following the blog’s appearance, we’ve had over 138,000 visits.

My posts varied in length from short bulletins to longer, reflective entries on our life together and how I was managing. I was keenly aware at the time that for our friends and family back home, this was the only source of information. I wanted to be honest about what was happening, but didn’t want to alarm or depress people with overly negative posts. I worried that this would somehow get back to my children and that was something I really wanted to avoid.  As a result, I became somewhat skilled at delivering bad news, but finding some way to find a bright side, or look for a context which was positive or hopeful. Born out of a fear of upsetting people, this looking for the upside started to influence the way I was looking at the situation and ultimately helped me cope a little better.

As time went on, I found out that the doctors and nurses at the hospital were reading the blog as well as all my colleagues, and eventually people I had never met who came across the blog by accident, and became part of a warmly supportive, embracing group of people who helped us stay afloat during those difficult months in London.

Go to next chapter: Body in Motion