ESUN

Our first year comes to a close

By Bruce Shriver, PhD
Editor-in-Chief, ESUN

On January 29th of this year, I wrote my editorial for the inaugural issue of ESUN. In it, I stated that we were publishing ESUN in the spirit of the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative's goal to help those who are dealing with sarcoma. The Initiative's logo represents three groups of people—sarcoma patients, their caregivers and loved ones, and the medical team—working together for the common purpose of improving the quality of life for those who have sarcoma. The breaks in the arrows and the gaps between them are meant to represent the miscommunications that often occur among us. I hope that the articles and other information that appeared in ESUN this past year have helped reduce the number of misunderstandings among these groups and have built some bridges over the breaks and gaps that exist. I fulfilled one of my primary goals in working on ESUN if some members of each of the three groups it addresses—patients, caregivers, and medical professionals—have found something of use in ESUN for themselves. We will continue to publish articles related to the progress that is being made towards finding a cure for sarcoma and for developing more effective and less aggressive treatment plans until a cure is found.

I am indebted to the members of our Editorial Advisory Board; each has a very demanding schedule as a physician. They have given an extraordinary amount of time to help bring ESUN to life. They have written and reviewed articles, answered what must have seemed like an endless number of phone and e-mail messages from me, and yet found the time to encourage me to continue with this effort. I am also indebted to our authors and those contributing other material to ESUN. In particular. I must thank Beverly Shriver, Eva Mae Connell, Tom Swartz and a number of other people for their extensive proof-reading of the articles, for the annotations they developed, and for making many helpful suggestions. As you can probably guess, putting each issue of ESUN together takes quite a bit of time. I am indebted to the readers who have written and shared their personal stories with me or asked me hard questions or thanked me. These notes have meant a great deal to me and have helped me put my time commitment into perspective; there is so much to do and so little time to do it in. I must confess that it is not particularly easy to deal with a disease that claimed the life of our only daughter on an ongoing basis.

In peace and hope, I wish you and yours the very best in the year ahead,
Bruce

PS: I have been asked numerous times why we don't publish a hard copy version of ESUN. The answer is quite simple—to keep our costs to a minimum, ESUN is distributed only in electronic form. Please send me your comments, suggestions and reactions to our efforts.