This is Bridget. Three things happened to Bridget in February:
1. She got an agent for her young adult novel.
2. She got married.
3. She found out she has Stage Four colon cancer.

I met Bridget a year ago at an Oregon SWCBI event. She had just moved to Portland from Wisconsin, where she was a teen librarian. She is a beautiful person, inside and out. When she found out she had an agent, she was just glowing. A few days later she went to a naturopath for headaches and vision problems. She ended up in the ER – and learned very quickly that she had cancer. Big, bad cancer.

As Bridget says in her blog, “I would like to add in here that I am a super super healthy non-smoking, non-drinking, carcinogen avoiding young vegetarian who wears sunscreen every day. I looked at the list of risk factors for colon cancer and it turn out that I don’t even have one. Not one risk factor. So that was a surprise. Then Barrett and I decided to get married. He proposed on my hospital bed, it was terribly romantic and we were married by the hospital chaplain the first possible moment we could be.”

But now Bridget is dealing with an ugly reality that is all too common in America today. Even when you have insurance, it doesn’t cover everything. Medscape reports, “The cost of treating colorectal cancer has skyrocketed over the past five years and the costs of new agents and regimens have risen 340-fold.”

Here’s how you can help. A group of writers who have been impressed with Bridget’s friendliness and what can only be described as her radiant joy (even now) has banded together to help Bridget with the costs she faces.

One of the activities will be an online auction. If you are an artist, do you have a piece of art you could donate? If you are an author, could you donate a signed copy of your book? Or even a critique of the first 10 or 20 pages of someone’s work in progress? Do you have anything else you could contribute?

If so, please email Jone MacCulloch macrush53@yahoo.com.

If you would like to learn more about Bridget, this is her Web site. You can also friend her on Facebook, which has pictures of her two weddings (one just before she went into surgery, the other when she was released from the hospital. A third one is planned.)

I’m donating some signed books and a critique. I promise if you can give something, you will receive good karma!