The TMI saga continues

After blogging about Emma Keller’s article in The Guardian about Lisa Adams (read my thoughts here), I felt better. Reading the comments that came in response to that blog made me feel better still. But now I feel bad again. And mad. Really mad. As if Keller’s article wasn’t bad enough/mean enough/hateful enough/out-of-line enough, now her husband has gotten in on the hating.

That’s right, her husband.

He too is a writer, for The New York Times, no less. He joined the fray, I can only assume in an attempt to defend his wife, for whom the fallout has not been kind. His article misses the mark as much as his wife’s article did, IMHO, and he makes a really lame comparison as the basis for his point.

He compares the way Lisa has handled and is handling her cancer to the way his father-in-law succumbed to his cancer. Lisa is in her 40s with three boys to raise. Bill Keller’s father-in-law was a few weeks shy of 80. Can we really compare the situation of a still-young mother to that of a man nearly 40 years her senior, who also faced kidney disease, diabetes, and dementia? I think not.

Mr Keller chooses to break the same rule his wife broke; the one rule that should remain forever unbroken in talking about a cancer patient and how s/he chooses to handle that cancer: don’t judge.

Mr Keller judges, right alongside his wife.

For example, he writes that “every cancer need not be Verdun, a war of attrition waged regardless of the cost or the casualties.”

Like his wife, he wonders aloud, in his column, about the cost of Lisa’s treatment. Which is none. of. anyone’s. business. He even calls into question her partaking of Sloan-Kettering’s Caring Canines program, in which “patients get a playful cuddle iwth visiting dogs.” He whines about neither Lisa nor Sloan-Kettering not telling him how much “all this costs and whether it is covered by insurance.”

Really?? He begrudges a critically-ill woman’s choice to pet a dog and is pissy because he’s not privy to how much it’s costing her?

He characterizes his father-in-law’s choice to stop pursuing life-extending measures as “humane and honorable” and calm and enviable, while Lisa’s is the opposite, in which she is “constantly engaged in battlefield strategy with her medical team.”

Again, this is none.of. anyone’s.business.

Perhaps the worst part of Mr Keller’s piece is this: “Adams is the standard-bearer for an approach to cancer that honors the warrior, that may raise false hopes, and that, implicitly seems to peg patients like my father-in-law as failures.”

If Lisa Adams wants to be the standard-bearer for one-eyed-one-horned-flying-purple-people-eaters, it is none of Mr Keller’s damn business. If she wants to wave a flag, Braveheart-style, it is none of his concern. If she wants to depend on hope to endure the hell-on-Earth she’s currently living with, he is the last person who should be flapping his gums about it. If she considers herself a success for doing what she felt was best for her and her family in her particular situation, why would any of us take umbrage? Shame on both Kellers.