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It’s Shark Week, or at least that’s the situation over at Discovery Channel. The annual, virtual immersion into the world of cartilaginous fish has been adopted by your author as some sort of metaphor, but she’s not sure… See more Living Like It’s Shark Week, Take 3 
Paula Deen’s new message I never heard of Paula Deen until this week, when the plump Food Channel celebrity and cookbook author announced she has Type 2 diabetes. The Georgia-born, sweet tea-loving cook has teamed up with Novo Nordisc to spread the word about dietary modification and life with diabetes. Her new platform, Diabetes in a New Light, highlights a drug she’s taking called Victoza. Type 2 diabetes tends to develop in overweight people who become resistant to insulin. Thi disease is epidemic in North America; it affects over 8 percent of the population. Almost 95 percent of adult-onset diabetes cases are Type 2; many could be avoided by diet and lifestyle modification. Diabetes causes blood vessel abnormalities throughout the body; it leads to secondary illnesses like heart disease, stroke, poor vision and blindness, kidney problems, neuropathy and other serious health problems. It’s a costly disease, apart from the See more A Good Outcome from Celebrity Chef Paula Deen’s Message about Diabetes? I found it hard to stomach yesterday’s Last Thanksgiving episode of the Big C. Besides that it’s August, and ill-timed, the show was just plain awful. (Sorry, Showtime, but if you don’t get this patient back on track you’re gonna lose her.) Cancer was absent again. But I really want to know: What drug is Cathy on? Is it intravenous? Is it a pill? How often does she take it? Is she anemic? Does she have mets in her liver? Does she have pain? Give the audience something real to wonder and care about, please. Even one, meaningfully-informed treatment decision would be welcome. I have full confidence Laura Linney could handle the discussion, and more. The only reference to the drug is that Cathy’s fingernails are falling off, said to be a side effect of the drug. So as not to make her cancer friend jealous, she covers the tips See more A Miserable Episode of ‘The Big C’ Tonight the Discovery Channel will begin its annual Shark Week festival on TV. “Show me your teeth,” dares a singing woman, repeatedly, in the preview.
Show Me Your Teeth I’m reminded of my thoughts on the advice — if you can call it that; it holds as a puzzle with me – from the recently-troubled Tracy Morgan as Tracy Jordan on NBC’s 30 Rock. Here’s a rerun, from last year’s ML on the same: Dialog from Jack the Writer (Season 1, Episode 4, 2006): Tracy Jordan: But I want you to know something… You and me, it’s not gonna be a one-way street. Cos I don’t believe in one-way streets. Not between people, and not while I’m driving. Kenneth: Oh, okay. Tracy Jordan: So here’s some advice I wish I would have got when I was your age… Live every week, like it’s shark week. 
(Hopefully a second opinion) When I last wrote on The Big C, a Showtime series in which the actress Laura Linney portrays a woman in her forties with advanced melanoma, I considered some of the options she might choose when the series resumes next Monday night. Laura Linney, in Showtime’s ‘Big C’ At the end of Season 1, she elected to try a course of IL-2 as was recommended by her young oncologist. Meanwhile, the FDA has approved Ipilimumab (Yervoy), an antibody treatment that revs up the immune system. And she’s in line, according to the script, for possible entry into a clinical trial that likely involves a targeted therapy, like vemurafenib for patients whose malignant cells have a genetic mutation in B-RAF. What I expect Cathy will do, before anything else happens and she receives any additional non-urgent treatment for her advanced melanoma, is get a second opinion. See more What’s Next on the Big C? (Hopefully a Second Opinion) 
I’ve been toying with the idea of messing with a cable TV show’s plotline. At the first season’s end of The Big C, the story’s protagonist decides to accept a harsh and usually ineffective treatment for her advanced melanoma: interleukin-2 (IL-2). Laura Linney as Cathy (Showtime image, The Big C) Cathy, played by the actress Laura Linney, understands the goal is not for a cure, but to temporize her disease for six months, when she might be eligible for a new melanoma drug through a clinical trial. Her oncologist has already completed the paperwork, according to the old script. The season ends with Cathy in a hospital bed with an IV catheter, presumably receiving the IL-2, and dreaming. So I thought I’d explain a bit on interleukins and IL-2 in particular: Interleukins are proteins defined by their capacity to communicate between different populations of white blood cells (between leukocytes). See more Interleukin 2, Cathy’s Planned Treatment in the Big C 
The situation in Japan remains grim. I can’t reasonably report on this, except to say what’s evident by the photographs, videos and usually-reliable sources: a second reactor may have ruptured. There’s been another burst of radioactivity into the air. Flickr, Official U.S. Air Force photo stream Meanwhile, thousands of bodies are being discovered in the post-Tsunami landscape along the northeast coast. The Emperor’s speech adds a feeling of gravity, essentially unfathomable to those who are not there, and maybe even to those who didn’t live, first, through the atomic bombings in that country 75 years ago. people in a shelter, as shown on NHK world TV Working my/our way* through The Pain of Others, Sontag writes: What to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering? …For all the voyeuristic lure – and the possible satisfaction of knowing, This is not happening to me, I’m not See more Change the Channel? 
Today’s will be a light post: Over lunch I was reading the current, Jan-Feb 2011 issue of AARP the Magazine. After some predictable chat about the smart and sassy Betty White, a Beatles update, a truly-scary mention of an uptick in teenage teething (kids are biting each other, vampire-style, and potentially sharing bad germs like HIV and hepatitis) and some super-sensible ideas for how adults might lose weight and feel better (by dancing, among other fun suggestions, and by eating less food), there’s a hemi–Seinfeld reunion in two parts: 1. Jason Alexander (George Costanza) has lost 30 pounds since he celebrated his 50th birthday back in 2009. “You get your vibrancy back,” he told the magazine. 2. Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Elaine Benes) turns 50 next week. I’ll leave my readers guessing as to which Elaine is the better dancer, now that we’re in our 50’s - A Seinfeld DVD cover 
“I don’t want to get sicker trying to get better and then just end up dying anyway” – Cathy, the 42 year old protagonist, with advanced melanoma, on the Big C. Spoiler alert: Don’t read this post if you don’t want to know what happens to Cathy in the Big C…After months of unusual and comfort zone-breaking behavior, Cathy See more Does Cathy Make the Right Cancer Treatment Decision in the Big C? 
The Big C’s plot includes at least two “atypical” and potentially complex features. First, Cathy chooses not to take chemotherapy or other treatment. This intrigues me, and may be the show’s most essential component – that she doesn’t just follow her doctor’s advice. Second, she doesn’t go ahead and inform her husband, brother or son about the condition, at least not so far… See more First Take On the Big C Jackie is supposed to be a crackerjack nurse who has some serious problems including drug addiction. That premise might be fair enough, in a House-like way, if her life-saving skills had unique value. But they don’t: the underlying problem with this show is that Jackie has no exceptional or redeeming qualities as a nurse. Sure, she cares about some of her patients, but that’s nothing extraordinary… See more Shutting Off Nurse Jackie The program promises to continue “its look deep inside the complicated heart and soul of a functioning addict, a loving wife, mother, and a first-class nurse.” I’m curious but must admit that last year I watched only part of one episode and didn’t return…The program promises to continue “its look deep inside the complicated heart and soul of a functioning addict, a loving wife, mother, and a first-class nurse.” I’m curious but must admit that last year I watched only part of one episode and didn’t return…Today she beckons half-smiling, an aura of pills and syringes above and syringes above her head. Maybe she’s happy about … See more A New Nurse Jackie in Preview 
There’s a new survivor on TV and she means business. In the latest episode of The Office, Kathy Bates walked into the Scranton branch of Dundler Mifflen and onto my living room TV screen as Jo Bennett, CEO of Sabre, a fictitious Tallahassee-based company. An assistant and two large canines accompany her as she meets the crew. She’s firm, graying and very much-in-charge. When the camera gets her alone, in focus, here’s what she has to say: “I’m Jolene Bennett, Jo for short. “I’m a breast cancer survivor, close personal friends with Nancy Pelosi, and Truman Capote and I slept with three of the same guys. When I was a little girl I was terrified to fly, and now I have my own pilot’s license. “I am CEO of Sabre International and I sell the best damn printers and all-in-one machines Korea can make. “Pleased to meet ya. |
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