MPNforum Magazine

If you’ve been to our home page recently you saw there’s an invitation to a party on our home page, www.mpnforum.com)  

     For our anniversary issue, published this Monday, April 16,  We’ve been working on a Catalog of all our articles.  It was necessary since some older  stories have become difficult to find. And there are many new readers who really don’t know what came before plus  Our first issue attracted 1064 viewers. Stories in last month’s issue were visited by 11,325.  And by the time we complete out first full year, over 80,000 people will have visited our pages.

That means, without a Catalog much of the work of the early months — articles written by friends with the courage to step up and tell their stories — are lost to the new visitors.

So we started to build a web page, a Catalog containing every story in MPNforum’s first year, 132 articles and over 400 comments by readers.  A picture, a short description, and a link to the original story. 

And that’s when the magic happened.

 As we worked on the Catalog, each story brought back a person, an MPN patient or caregiver, someone we had met in the Forum and learned to care about.  It’s an overwhelming experience, a storehouse of memories.  With a touch of a finger on the keyboard we can summon up an old friend, relive a story.

The Catalog is the party, the collection of people celebrating, suffering, searching, laughing and grieving.  It’s the whole first year of MPNforum Magazine wrapped up in a page.

In  our anniversary issue, we’ll have our regular columnists and a report on where we’re going, a poem, and a few surprises. But the centerpiece of the issue is this Catalog of 132 stories, a powerful reminder of how many friends we made in the Forum, how many stories have become part of our lives.

 If you’d like, you can look at the Catalog in advance,  in its still unfinished state, right here.  The page is password protected. The password is    Forum. 

I hope you’re well and enjoying the onset of Spring,

           Zhen