Social media is an internet-based form of communication that emerged in 1997 and since its emergence it has helped in no small measure to help us meet and connect with new people it also helps us to reunite and reconnect with people whose contact and companionship we might have lost prior to the advent and widespread use of social media.
All thanks to the social media Liz Brown for instance was able to reconnect with her nurse, Debbie Bye who treated her for four months in Adddenbrooke’s Hospital. Cambridge, in 1989 when she had a spinal tumour.The two developed a kind of friendship and bond thirty years ago when Mrs Debbie Bye nursed 14-years-old teen Liz Brown through aggressive osteoblastoma. According to Ms Brown, Debbie “realised I was struggling” and gave her “silly jobs” and made her to do “silly things” to make her cancer treatment as a teenager “less painful”, finding being on a children’s ward difficult, Mrs Debbie would give the teenager jobs like delivering post to the adult patients and “silly things like that to make it less painful than it could be”,
Ever since their encounter ended Mrs Debbie who now lives in Dronfield, Derbyshire and works in a nursery had always thought about Brown she said in a recent interview “I wondered what happened to Lizzy I was there when she was diagnosed. I knew she had been given roughly five years maximum to live and was struggling to walk again.” As faith would have it after thirty years Brown is still alive, hale and hearty. Mrs Debbie keeps a scrapbook of old pictures of her with her patients, but had lost the one of her and Ms Brown.
To appreciate and reconnect with the nurse who took care of her, Ms Brown who is now a 43-year-old woman with three children living in East Riding took to twitter and began a man hunt for her dear nurse through a series of tweets appealing to people to reconnect her with Mrs Debbie. To make her appeal reach a wide spectrum of people more than two thousand people retweeted the appeal. Mrs Debbie now fifty said that she “felt really emotional” after finding out about the appeal, after many of her friends sent a BBC article asking her, “is this you?”
It can be really hard to measure the magnitude of the impact we have on people’s lives as Mrs Debbie puts it “I enjoyed my job and did my job to the best I could, but didn’t feel like I had made that much impact on someone that 30 years later they could remember my name- it’s a bit overwhelming,” “I just tried to make it home from home, we did bobbing apples and went on day trips.
We even had nights where we took the kids to nurse’s flats and just had pizza and watched videos” she added. Ms Brown on the other hand was inspired by Debbie as she puts it “Debbie inspired me to go on to work with children as a sensory support assistant, and I think everything I have done is down to the way she realised that spirited, rebellious teenager was a real person, no matter what was wrong with her.”
Although the pair had only written to each other so far everything seems to be so emotional Ms Brown admitted to being “overwhelmed” after their brief conversation on Facebook.