Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Maureen Dowd, "Cascading Confessions": Angelina Jolie's Double Mastectomy

Scandal has rendered the Obama administration dysfunctional at a time when America has yet to emerge from its worst economic downturn in recent decades, and while the US faces monumental challenges overseas from the likes of North Korea and Iran. Instead of taking the reins and leading, Obama has allowed White House spokesman Jay Carney to take most of the heat, and Carney is now being bloodied even by the "progressive" media following the Justice Department's examination of the phone records of Associated Press reporters.

Or, we don't care if the IRS targets conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status, but the press is off limits.

Indeed, the Benghazi and the IRS scandal couldn't get much of a rise from The New York Times or its op-ed columnists, but the AP scandal has finally provoked a scolding from the Gray Lady (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2013/05/new-york-times-editorial-spying-on.html).

After Maureen Dowd, on Sunday, blasted the Obama administration for denying aid to Ambassador Stevens when he came under siege in Benghazi (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2013/05/maureen-dowd-when-myths-collide-in.html), I wondered whether she might pick up her pen and protest the IRS and AP debacles. I also wondered whether Thomas Friedman, off in the wilds of Yemen, might return home at lightning speed to cover these mushrooming stories. Maureen, however, has devoted today's column, entitled "Cascading Confessions" (http://wap.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/opinion/dowd-cascading-confessions.html), to Angelina Jolie's double preventive mastectomy, and Tom Terrific has written a piece entitled "A Visit to Yemen's Zoo," which, quite honestly, I didn't bother reading.

Re Jolie, Dowd observes:

"[Jolie] knows that she will face criticism for elitism, given that she has the money to get the more than $3,000 BRCA testing and the best surgeons, while other women don’t. Yet her courage in going public with the graphic details of her mutilation and reconstruction, even though she’s part of an industry that considers a 10-pound weight gain a career catastrophe, makes her a real-life action heroine.

Ever since Rock Hudson gave a face to AIDS and softened the position of Ronald Reagan, we have known it is possible for Hollywood stars to ameliorate the stigma of disease and spark recognition, conversation and inspiration."

Jolie's preventive mastectomy "makes her a real-life action heroine"? Maybe, but I have another heroine in mind.

More than forty years ago, my mother discovered a lump on her breast, which was determined to be cancerous. She underwent a radical mastectomy, which included removal of her lymph nodes, but there were no meaningful reconstructive alternatives at the time. Her left arm remained swollen for the rest of her life, but this did not stop her from playing the piano, writing poetry and typing scathing letters to her arch-foe, William Buckley. She never felt sorry for herself and never hid the fact that she had undergone the operation. She lived life to the fullest and fought to the end after she was diagnosed with lymphoma some twenty years later.

Jolie's preventive double mastectomy? I think it's wonderful that she could be honest and open.

Me? I suppose it's no surprise that in the twilight years of my professional career I'm an outside consultant to a cutting edge biotech firm in hot pursuit of novel monoclonal antibody therapies for cancer. I also plan to begin writing a book detailing the history of this quest.

Some day in the not too distant future, women will not need to go under the knife for breast and ovarian cancer. I look forward to that time.

1 comment:

  1. 35 years ago for my Mom, z''l. In her case the local doctor told her to "forget about it." Having said the same thing to her friend a few years earlier who then promptly died of breast cancer, his comments contained a macabre ring.

    So she traipsed on down to Chapel Hill where the doctors know enough to know what they don't know (a long way of saying they aren't sophomoric).

    Positive test and a breast+lymph removal later, my Mom was swimming, running 6+ miles a day, and obtaining her PsyD. Go Mom.

    But "go you" too for your work.

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