MistyList

"MistyList" began as an ad hoc method of keeping a small circle of friends and colleagues informed about Misty's health status. Some of these emails were forwarded, others asked to be put on the list, and eventually it grew to over 200 addresses. Judging from the number of people who said that they received forwarded versions of the messages, the number of regular recipients was probably closer to 500. More people, Misty would note, than regularly read the typical academic article.

"MistyList" was never an actual email list server, but simply an address list maintained on her computer. Quite a few people have asked for a compilation of the entire contents, and in fact those requests were the main motivation for setting up this web site.

I read somewhere that there are 70,000 cancer blogs on the web. The figure is probably just made up (or in any case, outdated), but there are lots of them. So, this is another. But it may still be useful—these are not merely stream-of-consciousness blogging, but communications that Misty carefully crafted, and usually they went through several drafts over a period of three or four days while she tried to find the proper balance of realism, optimism, and despair.

I've edited out some "boilerplate" that was included in each of the messages—notably a block of the text at the beginning of the message saying how to get off the list, and Misty's standard signature block at the end. I've also tried to catch all of the non-standard symbol translations and put these into standard HTML, but I may have missed a few, as the original emails were composed in three different computing environments. If you see something weird, it is just a transcription problem, not some mystical code.

MistyList emails

Last update: 18 October 2006