I don’t know Anissa Mayhew.

I know that she has made me laugh out loud more than once. (Like blow milk through your nose laugh, the woman is hysterical.) I know that she is a gifted writer, mom of three, wife to Peter, mother of a girl who is officially one year cancer free (yay GOD!), and has been a loving friend to many women who have supported me since I took our story on the internet. I know that her support of these women has inspired love and loyalty of the fiercest breed. She has got to be some lady that Anissa Mayhew.

And I am sad to know that yesterday, Anissa had a stroke. This 36 year old wise-cracking dynamo had a massive stroke.

The internet lit up like a Christmas tree when this terrible news broke. Twitter was on fire with tweets supporting Anissa, most bearing the hashtag #prayingforAnissa. If you are not familiar with Twitter, when people want to create a buzz, they use a hashtag to generate mass quantities of similar tweets which Twitter records and then lists the most popular as “trending topics” on the site. To have Anissa be a trending topic is the interet’s way of showing love to one in need, even if we are far away, or have never met.

 If you are like my husband (who does not read this blog, hehe) and countless others who don’t understand why people blog, why women use Twitter, or why we think people we know on the internet are our friends, this is why. Because women network, make friends, reach out and need each other. The internet and the tools we use here are just a new way to do what our great-grandmothers did at church socials in a time when families all lived in the same town and you would have multiple sisters and aunts within a two mile radius there to help. The world of 2009 that we live in doesn’t have those networks anymore, so we are forging new ones.

I don’t know Anissa Mayhew, but it is my honor and my pleasure to be at the outer reaches of her internet network, and I am grateful that they have asked me to pray for her. I am honored to participate in a world where women do not have to be down the block to support each other in times of need. If you would like to support Anissa too, please pray for her full recovery or support her family. You can find updates about Anissa and her family’s needs here or here.

*Update 11/19/09* There is a caringbridge site for Anissa here. There has been some good news, and some not so good, please keep praying.