In the early 1990’s, authors Tom and Vonne Barnett were suddenly confronted with every parent’s worst medical “bolt from the blue”: their only child, 30-month-old Emily, was diagnosed with an advanced – meaning metastasized – pediatric cancer. At the time, the thirty-something couple was living in northern Virginia. What followed was the defining crisis of their union: an intense 20-month battle to keep their first-born alive. About six months into the struggle, Tom started writing a weekly update on Emily’s progress (or lack thereof) for interested parties. Vonne contributed to this blog-like diary, and it was sent out by email, fax and regular mail to several hundred relatives and friends who spontaneously organized themselves into their family’s extended support network. Over time, the couple came to view the updates as something more important: a real-time memoir that would someday prove crucial to Emily’s understanding of how she became whom Tom and Vonne hoped she would become. The original diary ran about 400,000 words, or somewhere in the range of an 800-page book. In the late 1990s, Tom edited the text down to approximately 200,000 words and posted the 45 updates online at a website he created specifically for that purpose. They sought publication as a regular book, but then Tom got a job in Rhode Island and the project was shelved. But the meteoric rise of eBooks convinced Tom and Vonne to give publication another try. eBooks struck the authors as an entirely appropriate venue since they’re interested in making it easily available and they know - from first-hand experience - how parents and relatives of patients experiencing medical crises typically turn to the Internet to locate sources of information, comfort and inspiration. The authors haven’t made an effort to “improve” the updates from today’s perspective; while wiser on a host of subjects that arise in this family memoir, a lot of that wisdom stems directly from these experiences, so they felt it made most sense to share them in this unaltered format. If this eBook serial helps you better understand an analogous past experience or ongoing crisis in your life, then Tom, Vonne and Emily have accomplished what they set out to do by sharing their intense story. | by Thomas Barnett & Vonne M. Meussling-Barnett Free as eBook on Amazon |
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August 2015
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