Hey, There used to be a local radio station that had a segment called exactly that, “Fun facts to know and yell.” They would occasionally broadcast live from around town scaring the bejeebers out of people by yelling those fun facts, but it was full of interesting, unusual and maybe only slightly useful facts.
I have one of those I wanted to share with all of you. A brief background - as part of my 40 years in the AVM wilderness, I have been a patient at Mayo Clinic 3 times. I’ve gotten to know some people there, highly respect every single person I’ve ever met there and from 2011 to 2014, I was on the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media external advisory board. I was talking and digitally chatting and watching a webinar they did and it had a statistic that frankly blew me away.
On an active health care related online community, for every one person who appears to be involved online (posting, liking, commenting etc.) there are 50 more who are reading and benefiting from the information and the comments and the input. So, that means that @DickD and I count for 100 people. I think that’s an incredible number and I share it to encourage all of us to be a little more active - because we all represent 50 more AVM peeps or their families and if you have something good, bad or elsewhere in between, many of them are probably wondering too.
This site is reaching way more people than it appears and it is making a difference…
And on that note,
I wish you all quiet heads, good hearing and calm hearts. (I’ve got one of the three!)
@TJ127 you’re absolutely right. If I look into the statistics for the site, there are always way more “posts read” than there are posts created, so this week there are about 60 posts created by fewer than 30 people (and I account for 25% of the posts, I’m afraid) but those 30 active people this week have read from one or two posts each to maybe twenty or thirty posts to literally hundreds of posts, depending on their own needs.
I look at the stats from time to time (I assume others may not have access to those, me being a moderator) and there are plenty of people who come in, read what’s going on, and stay quiet. Or some people who pretty much read everything in the year but say very little. I’m impressed, to be honest, by the degree to which other people stay in touch by reading without being loud about it like me…
… and I sometimes worry that I suppress people contributing by saying too much, too often. So occasionally, I stop myself. But probably not as much as i should
Fun fact? One of our members has read 14,800 posts in the last year. I think that’s amazing.
Thanks TJ! Without this site, I would have not made it. I have learned more here than from any of the Yale educated doctors I see on a regular basis. Because of this site, I question my doctors more and more and I demand (nicely) answers. I’m smarter than I was right after my rupture and now, I’m a force to be reckoned with. Thank AVM Survivor’s! Keep on posting.
