New Study about Pie and Cowbell and PTSD

This post is dedicated to and inspired by the amazing woman who introduced me to Pie and Cowbell - Jody Schoger!

A new study (and by study I mean something I created in my head while I took a shower this morning) based on many participants (and by many I mean more like a handful, or as many twitter names as you can fit in 140 characters) in a variety of social networking forums (and by variety I mean Twitter with a side order of Facebook) has shown (and by shown I mean I inferred) that Pie and Cowbell (and by pie and cowbell I actually mean real pie and real cowbell) can reduce cancer-related PTSD symptoms (you all know what that means right?) by a statistically high number (and by that I mean a number I made up like 99.99999%).


Okay, this is what really happened. There was this article in the NY Times about a woman who is living with Metastatic Breast Cancer. I saw it posted and I went and read it. So did some other women on Twitter. Then we shared it with anyone who hadn't read it yet. Then we all started tweeting. We are all cancer survivors, some with mets and some without.

At first the conversation was understandably a little deep because we are talking about having a disease that is life threatening. But after we got through the deep waters, with lots of love and support to buoy us, we started tweeting about pie and cowbell. This made us all feel a lot better. I know you might not understand how tweeting about pie and cowbell could make anyone feel better, in fact you might not understand how tweeting can make anyone feel better, but for me and a few other people it seems to work. All the tensions that the article brought up started to dissipate.

Now in my mind cancer is as individual as people and so is PTSD. So what works for a handful of amazing women on Twitter may not work for you. But here are a few other idea to help with PTSD: Running, chocolate, sewing, quilting, cycling, swimming, taking a walk, petting your dog, calling a friend, drinking some tea, writing, blogging, singing, dancing, skiing, knitting, reading, watching a movie, drawing, painting, playing music, listening to music, playing with your kids, playing with your neighbors kids, playing with your grandkids, being no where near kids, shopping, scrapbooking, tai chi, yoga....Do you get the idea, the list goes on and on. Find what works for you and do it! I would love to hear what works for you cause it might work for me too, but even if it doesn't I am glad you found something. Who knows, maybe they'll do a study about you too:)

To find and read about the amazing women who inspired this post you can look at my blog-roll listed here. They are Jody, Marie, Lani, Anna, Katie, Stacey, Nancy, and Alicia, among others!

And to those wonderful women I say, come to my house anytime. I'll be serving pie and starting the Cowbell Choir!