Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes; that’s how the cast of the musical Rent marked the passing of one year. As the MS & Me Blog celebrates one year since our first post, we thought we’d take a look back at the last 525,600 minutes and mark some of our highlights.
We started as a cadre of seven people of ranging writing experience and something to say. We are now 9 moderately experienced bloggers with a popular platform, writing about the important issues to the MS community… and we love our community.
In the past twelve months, our team of nine has written 38,677 words in the form of 62 blog posts (for the composition students, that’s 623 words per post). Not bad for some of us who haven’t written more than a thank you card since school.
20,735 of you have come to this page to see what we have written and spent countless hours (okay, we can count them but my maths skills have taken an MS hit) reading and joining in the conversation. By ‘joining in’ I mean commenting - 404 times you’ve commented to share your story, to offer your experience, to ask a further question and to make the MS & Me community more than we hoped it could be.
We have celebrated our personal triumphs as well in this past year. One of our ranks produced a film, another named finalist for best personal blog in Ireland. One of us was named the MS Ireland Person of the Year and one ranked as the world’s #1 online leader on the topic of multiple sclerosis. One of our bloggers has been leading the European charge for MS employment rights and yet another advises people about travelling with disability.
There have been blogs (and comments) about relapses and fatigue, of family and of falling. We’ve written about staying positive and facing death. You’ve read about keeping it private and falling in public. There have been posts about before MS, what’s next after diagnosis and about children and MS. We’ve touched the difficult subject of depression due to MS and the joys of travel in spite of it.
It wasn’t just our MS & Me blog community who noticed either!
With less than 10 months under our collective blogging belt, MS & Me was first nominated, then short listed and eventually made a finalist as both “Best Blog 2014” and “Best Group Blog”. While we didn’t take home any hardware from the night, two of our ranks attended and represented our entire community. We hope you are as proud of this growing community as we are.
Now, as the old saying goes, “self-praise goes but little ways”.
Enough about what has happened in the past year. We look forward to the next twelve months and beyond as we grow with YOU, as we celebrate in spite of MS, as we touch on topics that are most sensitive and as we ALL share our best hopes as we walk (or wheel) along our collective life’s path with multiple sclerosis.
We look forward to the journey with you and hope that you’ll bring a friend now and again.
Until the day when we are no longer needed, we are all here for one another.
We are “MS & Me”...
Cheers!
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