Teen Cancer Patient's Bucket List Blog Goes Viral

Fifteen year-old Alice Pyne started her blog on Monday. By Thursday, the terminally ill teen in England was granted one of the wishes she put on her “bucket list:” to be trending on Twitter.

That is, with a little help from Katy Perry and Prime Minister David Cameron, who, after it was brought to his attention by Pyne’s MP, commended* Pyne’s drive for bone marrow donors (one item on her list is “to make everyone sign up to be a bone marrow donor”).

Some of the other items on her bucket list — like traveling to Kenya or becoming a dolphin trainer — are, she admits, unattainable due to her declining health. Other wishes are wholesomely adolescent, like eating a lot of chocolate at Cadbury’s or meeting boy band Take That. And now she is going to get to meet Take That this weekend, Alice wrote in her third blog post this week.

The velocity with which Alice’s blog became popular is a sign of how much people still hunger for individual “inspirational” stories; a blog written by a teen is a way to break through the ennui of pain and disease. Alice herself seems to be very levelheaded about the whole thing, even through her excitement, and she’s careful to draw distinctions about what this is really about:

There isn’t a Paypal or Donate button on here, because I didn’t mean for this to be such a big thing. It was just so that I could write on here and do the things I wanted to do and my friends could read about it them, which I’m still going to do. It’s nice you’re all here too but I really don’t want any money giving and we’ve actually been offered so many wonderful experiences that I’ve definitely got a lot of exciting days ahead.

In lieu of sending her funds, here’s the National Marrow Donor Program in the U.S..

* For Internet skeptics who have been let down before, presumably the politicos fact-checked all this beforehand.

Dying Teen’s Bucket List Goes Viral [MSNBC]
Alice’s Bucket List [Alice Pyne]