From Anti-cancer: A New Way of Life:In a book published in 2009, Jeffrey Zaslow tells the story of a group of eleven childhood friends who scattered across the United States after leaving high school. Their friendships survived almost forty years and all the ups and downs of life - success and failure at university, marriages, divorces, and difficulties with children. In September 2007, one of them - Kelly - was told that she had breast cancer and that she would need family support. Instead of turning to her family, however, she confided the news by e-mail to her far-flug high school girlfriends, and it was as if she had sparked an "instant shower of love." She was deluged with e-mails, phone calls, letters, caards, packages. When her chemotherapy casued painful mouth ulcers, one of her girlfriends sent a machien to make milk shakes to soften her mucous membranes. Another, whose daughter had died from leukemia, knitted her a wollen hat so she wouldn't catch cold after losing her hair. A third made pajamas from special cloth to make night sweats less unpleasant. Kelly often found it easier to talk about what she was going through with her girlfriends than with doctors. "We've always known each other so long, we can tell each other anything," she said joyfully.Research confirms the importance of a network of friends. In the Nurses' Health Study, a large-scale study of nurses in the United States, women with breast cancer who could name ten friends had a four times better chance of surviving their illness than women who could not. The geographical proximity of these friendships was not significant; the protective effect seemed to stem from the simple fact of feeling connected. Friendship also plays a major role for men: A Swedish study of 736 men found that friendships had as strong an effect on health as the fact of being married. On the other hand, the study found that only smoking affected health as negatively as feelings of lonliness and isolation.
Wow, congratulations.
Ya know, for a while before I came here I was in the UCR for a few days. I'm not surprised about these allegations.