Idea

We heard last night from a friend whose sister was just diagnosed with breast cancer.

This happens with some regularity, but it always stops me dead in my tracks, because I know how awful those first hours and days can be.

There's so much happening, all at the same time, with such urgency, that it can be hard to catch your emotional breath. Breaking the news to family and friends, reading up on the disease, networking your way to good doctors, and finding helpful predecessors to talk to—all while still in shock—is a dizzying, exhausting process.

In an effort to pass along helpful information as quickly as possible, I pulled together some links for our friend and sent them off right away. But it dawned on me this morning that what a newly diagnosed person really needs is a one-stop shop, an aggregator of all things breast cancer, with links to every conceivable resource, all designed specifically for the newly diagnosed. You know, immediate technical support.

There could be some kind of easy interface that asked for basic data—diagnosis details (if available), age, geographic location—and then pointed the visitor to the most important information for those first hours and days.

This probably exists in some form in lots of different places, but I don't know of any single place that calls out to all newly diagnosed folks. It would need to be the Google of cancer resources—the place you would know to go without having to think about it.

I need to think more about this—and, of course, do a hard-target search of what's already out there—but this feels to me like something that could and should be done.

More to come.