Welcome to PMP Awareness Blog
Why are we here, doing what we are doing?

Hello, I am Bob Peterson and along with my friend Kevin Kersey will be hosting / moderating / writing pieces that we hope will motivate you to respond and participate in this blog. As time goes along both of us will share our experiences, but at this point as way of introduction just know that we are both PMP patients / survivors. Kevin is more of a survivor than me at this point, but hopefully that will change and I will catch up with him.

Today I want to share a story from a posting that was received on our sister PMPBellyButton Yahoo message board. The excerpt has been changed to hide the names of individuals and to protect the guilty. But in the story you will hear at least one reason why a number of us have felt the need for aggressive information sharing site such as PMP Awareness, and also one of the rewards that we receive when we are able to help someone. On to the story:

To all of you on pmpbellybuttons:
My sister is now recovering from her surgery at St. Agnes in Baltimore. Dr. Esquivel has done a tremendous job. We were faced with our home hospital telling her to go home, that there were no more options. She found your website and went to Baltimore. Dr. Esquivel could not promise us what he could do until the surgery, but felt he could at least giver her comfort and a little more time. We got more than that. Thanks to you people, St. Agnes and Dr. Esquivel.

She wanted me to let all of you know how wonderful she is doing. We all keep asking ourselves how this miracle happened. We want to give hope to people who could not find hope anywhere else. If we had listened to the Dr. at home hospital my sister was looking at only a month or two of life.

G-d Bless all of you at the website that helped us make this choice.

Those short 3 paragraphs point out several things that motivate us in producing this website:

1. Mainstream medicine (home hospital is a well respected major metropolitan teaching hospital) just doesn’t know enough about the PMP umbrella of diseases to help, and unfortunately may actually mistreat the patient.
2. Mainstream medicine if they admit they just can’t do anything, don’t know or won’t refer you to one of the renown specialists in the United States or Internationally who are saving lives everyday.
3. We as a group, advocate seeing one of the specialists as soon as the diagnosis comes down, and want to provide a site where you can find where they are and questions to ask them.
4. Finally, we want to give hope to people who could not find hope anywhere else.

While we can’t and won’t give medical advice, we will share our experiences and assist anyone in finding and communicating with the true PMP Specialists. Please don’t hesitate to ask, as the only reward we get are wonderful emails such as the one above.