Living with Cancer: Leroy Sievers

For the most part, I am a very blessed person. I have had no immediate family suffer from disease. In fact, I have yet to attend a blood relative's funeral. But I empathize, and I do this a lot. So when I got a chance to speak with Leroy Sievers I was very interested to ask him some questions.
My hardest question was why should we care? I was prepping with Gillian Coldsnow and asked her this. Her facial expression told me that she was impressed with the frankness of the question but concerned about how I phrased it. Don't worry, I was more polite when I asked Sievers! I was just reading all his entries and started thinking about the world. People dying in Darfur, Iraq, so many people suffering the world over - why should we care? Why do we care and empathize? Sievers's answer moved me deeply, and my heart felt the truth in his words.
"Cause we’re all human. Look, I spent my adult life as a journalist going and watching bad things happen to people. I've literally seen tens of thousands of deaths in front of me. There are a lot of deaths in the world and lot of deaths in this world are meaningless, cruel and violent. WE should care about all of them whether you know the person or not. And one of the things with cancer patients is I may not know most of them, only electronically, and there are people out there that don’t write in, or they may just be readers, but I know just through shared experience... I have a sense of they’re going through and they have a sense of what I am going through and that’s meaningful. No death is meaningless no life is meaningless."

You can read Leroy Sievers's blog here
My Cancer for more on the feature in Morning Edition: Leroy on Morning Edition

You can read my interview with Leroy on our website:

NWPR Interview with Sievers