Jenna Langer created a blog – – after being diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome. She uses the blog to report on her own progress, comment on issues of public policy and express her own creativity.

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My name is Jenna Langer, I’m 26 years old, and I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma at age 17, thyroid cancer at age 21, and myelodysplastic syndrome at age 25.

I have a blog that I started this last time when I was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, mainly because a lot of young adults, I’m very mobile, and I’ve moved around a lot, and it was very difficult to keep people updated on what was going on with me without having some sort of main channel to communicate.

And the first time I was diagnosed, I had a CaringBridge page but I just wanted to make it a little bit more Flexible for what I wanted to do. And so I started a blog called the redhead report, which cataloged my journey through a bone marrow transplant an unrelated bone marrow transplant, which who my donor I found through be the match.

And in addition to that, I often commented on public policy issues affecting young adults with cancer. And cancer care overall.

I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on the blog. I tried to keep it honest, but yet not. I’m not downtrodden because that hasn’t been my attitude throughout this. I think attitude is everything in dealing with cancer and it was also therapeutic for me to write the blog and to get such great feedback both on the blog itself and on my social media channels like Facebook that I use to promote my posts and it was good.

And since then I’ve, I’ve Been interviewed on NPR, Minnesota Public Radio, and a few other places. Just talking about the unique experiences of a young adult with cancer.

I’ve always liked writing and writing is a way to organize your thoughts and it was an effort to get my thoughts out on paper, organize them, and just for me to process things that were going on in my head and put it down on paper. And also yeah, know that the farther along it got, the farther reach it had.

And I heard some great feedback from people I had never met. I kept a positive attitude by setting out to do it. It was a constant. thing that I always had on my mind and trying to stay positive. It wasn’t something that came naturally for sure. There were definitely dark days and I didn’t probably write on those days because I didn’t feel like it.

But the blog was my chance to be creative when I felt like there was no outlet for me to be creative during treatment. I think being treated as a 25 year old in a pediatric oncology ward and my other option was being treated with adults who were mostly, because MDS is a, typically a disease of older adults, were typically men 65 plus. There weren’t to um, Express into discuss what was going on.