
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.