MSWorld members have learned first hand about online support through our Message Boards and Chat Rooms. Many of our members have also discovered CarePages where each of us can set up a site where our friends and family can communicate with us by way of message boards.

Why do this? If we, or someone we know, is ill or in the hospital, they can communicate in one place to let others know the latest update.

Then we can easily log onto to CarePages.com and read and respond. In the last few months, a friend of mine who is fighting cancer and all the complications, is able to let us all know the news. Sometimes her daughter puts the message in. It's a form of communication that is least exhausting for someone who is ill.

Now the founders of this site, used by thousands, has written this book so we can learn "What to say, what to do, how to care with compassion." The book is filled with touching, real stories from CarePages patients and their families who were once isolated by illness.

I think it's a must read. You most likely won't read it straight through, as you would a novel. This is one to keep nearby where you read most of the time or where you want to read something worthwhile and uplifting just before dozing off or when you need some added inspiration.

A quote in the beginning of the book says beautifully what the authors urge us to face, with compassion.

"There's an unspoken rule in our culture that we don't talk about this stuff -- illness and death. But intuitively, we know we should, and our impulse is to talk." Janet Morahan-Martin, Professor of Psychology, Bryan University

The ten chapters encompass many areas:

1. What Can I Do When Hard Times Hit?
2. Moving into the Unknown: Finding Strength in Our Vulnerability and Embracing Change
3. Letting Go: We Can't Change This or Make it Different, but We Can Move Through This by Giving Our All to an Ailing Loved One
4. Connection: Finding the Opening to Help One Another
5. Acts of Kindness: Sometimes It's the Little Things That Count
6. Give What You Have: It's All We Can Do
7. As Time Moves On: The Heart and Soul of the Healing Process
8. Caring for the Caregiver: Healing and Pain Are Powerful, Transformative Teachers
9. Making Caring Visible to the World: Ordinary People Who Have Made an Extraordinary Difference.
10. The Etiquette of Illness and Loss.

This book is well worth the minimal cost, and more.

MSWorld has a special link for us to set up our own sites with the MSWorld logo. Just click http://www.carepages.com/msworld and follow the directions.



Amazon.com will donate 5% of purchases made through the search link below to MSWorld®. For any purchases made through links to specific books from our individual book review pages, Amazon.com will donate 15%.