MUGI – My Unique Gift Idea

Sometimes the best gift is simply a community of people to talk to, especially if you are undergoing a challenge of a lifetime that will shake you to the core of your existence. It was this gift that Dr. Phil Berman gave to the world when he founded RedToeNail.

Phil was a two time cancer survivor who decided to give himself, and the rest of the cancer community, a forum with which to connect to one another. In his words, the concept behind RedToeNail is for people with cancer to pool their collective thoughts, experiences, and strength together through the use of blogs and build a community that meets the unique needs of those fighting cancer.

And why RedToeNail? Close to the first anniversary of his diagnosis, his oncologist’s wife had a dream that he had ten red toenails. One toenail for each year that he lived post diagnosis, so he decided to make that his dream, too, and painted one toenail red every year he survived.

The blog has some interesting benefits that people who are in normal health would not immediately guess. Says Phil, when you suffer from this type of illness, family and friends, constantly wanting updates on your condition, become like “echo chambers” and you find yourself telling the story over and over again, which gets very emotionally draining. This, instead of having real conversations in the here and now with your loved ones. The blog solved that by giving updates to his family so they knew how he was, freeing him to actually talk with them about their feelings instead of medical facts.

Some of the blogs are really beautiful poetry, and combine a dark picture with an incredibly bright ambience, making this truly a remarkable human achievement for such a simple undertaking.

Dr. Phil passed away on February 8, 2009, but his memory will live on for a very, very long time.