Teenage girl blogged about her painful road to death

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Blogger's death made front page in Norwegian newspaper

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For one year 18 year old Regine Hansen Stokke in Norway blogged about her fight against cancer. Thousands of people followed her blog  up to the day of her death.

A longer version of this story can be found in the online media blog BetaTales

Not often is the death of a teenage girl front page stories of major national newspapers. But it happened this week. The personal blog of Regine Hansen Stokke has captivated thousands of Norwegians, who have followed closely all the suffering, mourning and emotional outbursts involved in fighting cancer.

She died on Thursday this week. Only two days earlier she had written her last blog post:

"Things are going really bad for me these days. Today I have been sitting up only two hours in total. Otherwise I have just been in bed ...

I can die at any moment now... I have never been so sick in my whole life, and it is an incredibly scary feeling.  But at least I am less scared of death now than before. Maybe it is because I am so exhausted and have so much pain. "

Regine was given the diagnosis MDS/AML in August last year. It is a serious form of blood cancer.

Two months later she decided she would start a blog about having a serious illness. The blog was named Face your Fear - and adding: "Accept your war. It is what it is."

Since then she has blogged almost daily sharing the pain, her fear, joyful moments, stays in hospitals, the love of her family and her own reflections trying to stay hopeful at the same time as she was scared.

Over time more and more people started following the blog. And they shared their compassion and gave her all their support.  Blog postings frequently had several hundred comments from readers. The last posting, in which her younger sister told the readers about her death, so far has received more than 8.400 comments from readers sending their condolences.

Some of her readers were so moved that they started to collect money to help fight cancer. A lot of people thanked her for her openness, and wrote that it had been of great support in their own suffering and mourning.

In one of the last blog postings Regine told about how her family had moved the celebration of Christmas Eve one month ahead, knowing that she was about to die.

A few days before her death several hundre people from Kristiansund, the town she lived in, walked through the streets and to her house with torch lights to show here support.

Regine's blog became one of the most read in Norway and this week has topped the list. Almost 200.000 people visited her blog the day after her death.  Several Facebook groups have been formed in her memory. The biggest one has as I write 40.600 member. Also a second group has more than 30.000 members.

A longer version of this story can be found in the online media blog BetaTales