When I first heard about eHope, over a year ago, I was excited! Here was yet another great example of how face-to-face relationships, online networking, and heightened awareness of the importance of social capital could be combined in powerful ways. Jeffrey Wood, eHope's founder, is a visionary who is bringing all this together to help communities support people who are facing life-threatening illnesses. I lost no time in calling him up and arranging for him to be a featured guest at the Ethos Roundtable. He came down from Maine to Cambridge for the Ethos session, and impressed us all not only with the wisdom of the eHope model, but with his own spiritual depth.
As many readers of my blog know, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 1999. There was no such thing as eHope at that time, so I got by with a lot of help from my wonderful and supportive friends, but the coordination involved was an extra source of stress.
For ten years, there's been no recurrence of cancer, but recently tests confirmed that I have a minor malignancy, and will need surgery. I'm one of the lucky ones - my condition is not at all life-threatening. However, I've been worrying about all the logistics involved in surgery and after care. Yesterday, it occurred to me that I should ask my buddy Jeffrey for some coaching about how I could set up an eHope "Lite" version for myself, so that I could do some of the coordination online. He very graciously called me up today, and offered to work with me to set up a full-fledged eHope community; it turns out that I'm eligible, even though I'm not based in Maine and am not facing a terminal illness.
So now, I'm not just a fan - I'm going to be a client! This is not just a boon for me, but an opportunity to bring eHope to the greater Boston area and raise a wider awareness of what it offers.
