Dooce. It's a blog. It's a woman who blogs. Being dooced is a word that means losing your job because of something you blogged. Back when blogs first started to become a popular activity, Heather B. Armstrong got fired for writing about work and the people she worked with, and it made national mainstream news. Dooce became a cautionary tale of weighing how much a blogger should reveal and what protection they should have in what they shared online. Eventually, everyone you blog about is going to find your blog. No one really thought that before Armstrong got fired for her satirical take on where she worked.

To this day, and by her own account, she receives hundreds of hate emails and blog comments. But she also has hundreds of thousands of devoted blog fans, readers who stop by at least once a day to get Dooce's take on her every day life -- which is usually quirky, insightful, irreverant and always humorous. From motherhood to Mormons, no one is safe and no topic off-limits as far as I can tell.

The latest blogging at Dooce has to do with cancer. It all started with a scar that kept growing and self-employment health insurance that had Heather asking how much a biopsy would cost before consenting to one because if it cost as much as a casket she needed to weigh her options. Luckily, whatever answer the doctor gave her, she consented to having the growth checked. The results of the biopsy are in. Heather has been diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma, as she blogs, the most common of all cancers.

"It is not a melanoma, and most likely will not kill me, but the fact that I have one at my age is cause for concern. It is the result of many years of negligence on my part, of all those times I never fully protected my skin from the sun. I'd say it wasn't ever willful negligence, necessarily, maybe just a huge portion of carelessness mixed with laziness and the idiotic assumption that it would never happen to me.

Now I'm afraid to go near a window else a ray of sun touch my skin and kill me instantly. Irrational, yes, but look what being rational got me in the first place: CANCER. Next week she is going to cut the whole thing out of my arm, and then I am going to bring it home and plant it in a jar next to the kitchen window. I will name it Ed."

After Dooce gets done blogging cancer, cancer will never be the same.

In the second part of the two-part exclusive interview with ABC's Good Morning America Diane Sawyer, Sheryl Crow shares she is cancer-free and feeling great as a breast cancer survivor. The diagnosis of breast cancer came as a surprise as she is not a smoker and has no family history of the disease. She received enormous support from her family and friends during treatment, whom she refers to as "this incredible tribe of women." Before Dana Reeve died of lung cancer, she gave Crow advice on dealing with the emotional aspects of being a newly-diagnosed cancer patient and dealing with the recent separation from Lance Armstrong by telling her that the only way to go through grief was to grieve.

Crow talked about meditating and changing her diet. "I kind of went into a full-on Eskimo diet, where I ate a lot of salmon. In fact, I'm salmoned out of my brains ... and really green vegetables, just eating really clean, organic food. Listen, I haven't had a doughnut in I can't remember when."

Breast cancer forced Crow into an introspective place of self-realization in facing and overcoming fears -- and the wisdom that comes with that when she said she tried to at least address her fears and not be overcome by them. "The fear of things not always working out. You come to a point in your life where you realize it's not my job to prove to my parents or to my record label or to the world or to my lover that I matter. The fact is that you matter."

"It's not a good place to be concerned with always being right with everybody, always pleasing people, because ultimately you wind up betraying yourself a lot."

Crow shared that she sees her breast cancer diagnosis and being a cancer survivor as part of life's deepening experiences where obstacles are removed and opportunities come in.

Last Friday night, Crow joined the Dave Matthews Band in a concert at Fenway Park. But before she went onstage -- in part of giving back as a cancer survivor --  she made an unannounced surprise visit to Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to visit children with cancer at the Jimmy Fund Clinic.

The results of an Environmental Working Group Body Burden testing program has revealed that mothers and daughters share a common body burden of at least 35 environmental cancer-causing chemicals including phthalate plasticizers, lead, methyl mercury, brominated flame retardants, and Teflon and Scotchgard perfluorochemicals PFOA and PFOS. These pollutants appear to be passed from a mother's placenta or breast milk into her daughter's body. Some of the key findings in this testing program found:

• Daughters tested had more chemicals in common with their mothers than with a group of 16 other women who were tested. This underscores the long-lasting influence of the pollution passed from mother to daughter, and their shared exposures as the child grows up. 
• The chemical burden inherited by daughters at birth will last for decades, some for a lifetime -- and the daughters will pass this same chemical burden on to their children.
• Chemicals that persist in the body were found at higher levels in mothers than daughters, showing how chemicals can build up in the body over a lifetime.
  

According to EWG, the six biomonitoring programs -- conducted between 2000 and 2006 -- revealed a total of 455 different pollutants, pesticides, and industrial chemicals in the bodies or cord blood of 72 different people -- including ten newborn babies with an average of 200 chemicals in each child.

"EPA studies show that children from birth to age two are ten times more sensitive to cancer-causing chemicals than adults," said Jane Houlihan, EWG's vice president for research. "Scientists have found that chemicals toxic effects can be passed down for four generations, by causing permanent genetic changes that can be inherited. A stew of toxic chemicals is not the legacy mothers want to hand down to their children." To read an overview of all results from EWG's Body Burden testing program, go here.

CNN's Todd Leopold has reviewed a new book of doubt, humor, hope and motherhood -- the passions of Marjorie Williams. A collection of Williams essays and profiles, The Woman at the Washington Zoo, is being timed for release on Mother's Day. Edited by her husband Noah, Williams, who once worked as a journalist for publications such as the Washington Post, Vanity Fair and Slate, and who lost her life to liver cancer, was known for her honesty and unflinching gaze into the complexities, conflict and truth about people and life. In the last section of the book, she writes about the shock of being diagnosed with liver cancer and how she coped with telling her children the truth about her cancer. Marjorie Williams died on January 16, 2005. She was 47. To read the entire book review and discover a book that makes for good reading, go here.

Dr. Sandra Steingraber, cancer survivor, ecologist and author, will present Contaminated without Consent: How Chemical Pollutants in Air, Food, and Water Violate Human Rights at the University of Illinois at Springfield on Wednesday, April 19, in observance of Earth Day. Earth Day, in its 38th year, is recognized on April 22 as a day to raise awareness for environmental issues affecting our health and the health of our planet, and as a way for people to celebrate the planet and encourage responsibility for it.

Dr. Steingraber is an internationally recognized author of the book Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment focused on environmental links to cancer and reproductive health. According to background information about her book, it was the first work to bring data on toxic release together with data from U.S. cancer registries. She has a new book called Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood. In addition, Dr. Steingraber was named Ms. Magazine's Woman of the Year in 1997. In 1998 she received the Jennifer Altman Foundation's first annual Altman Award for inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer as well as the Will Solimene Award from the American Medical Writers Association for excellence in medical communication. The Sierra Club calls her the Rachel Carson for our times.

This presentation is free and open to the public. You can also see a live webcast of the presentation at LIVE WEBCASTS FROM UIS, on April 19, 2006 at 7:30 p.m.