Dr. Elaine Schattner's notes on becoming educated as a patient
Dr. Elaine Schattner's notes on becoming educated as a patient
© Elaine Schattner, 2009, 2022 By : Template Sell.
Sometimes there’s no way to mend a person or a bad situation. You can’t deny reality. But if you’re still conscious and able to communicate, you may be able to lessen the damage you’ve done, or the pain someone else is experiencing, just a bit.
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…
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 […]
(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. At the end of Season 1, she elected to […]
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). Cathy, played by the actress Laura Linney, understands the goal is not for a […]
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. Meanwhile, thousands of bodies are being discovered in the post-Tsunami landscape along the northeast coast. The […]
“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
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…
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…
Today is the start of this year’s Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Dialog from NBC’s 30 Rock, Season 1, Episode 4 “Jack the Writer” (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 […]
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.
