She turned 104 in April: Aggressive treatment for centenarians

Her father had sent her to secretarial school. She married, and then split up with her husband, a traveling salesman, during the Great Depression. She worked as a stenographer to pay rent to her parents for a small sunny bungalow overlooking a canal in East Rockaway, New York. She retired in 1961.

Then in 2003, when Hazel Homer was 99, after several recent hospital stays, more than one doctor advised that there was little to be done about her failing heart except wait for it to fail a final time. But Hazel was not interested in waiting to die of old age.

She kept talking to doctors until one agreed to install a biventricular defibrillator, five years ago. Now, at 104, her heart is still ticking, thanks to the specialized pacemaker and defibrillator that synchronize her heartbeat and can deliver a slight shock to revive her if her heart falters.

So far, it has never needed to shock her heart out of a potentially fatal arrhythmia.

Hazel now has a live-in aide at her tiny bungalow. She has been quite healthy throughout her life. Indeed, since the surgery, she has had only a single hospital stay, a brief one for pneumonia.

Her operation, a month before her 100th birthday, reflects a new frontier in medicine: surgery for centenarians. Some say, however, that aggressive treatment for the extremely elderly can give patients false hope and a diminished quality of life.

Advice to adult children of extremely elderly parents: Heed your parent's preferences about aggressive care, rather than your own.

Read a story about aggressive care on the other side of the coin.

Thanks to Anemona Hartocollis for the source article in today’s New York Times.

With hormone pills, radiation, surgery and grit: Skin lotion for cancer patients

Kairol Rosenthal, 35, is a choreographer and writer in Chicago. For the last seven years she has battled thyroid cancer with hormone pills, radiation, surgery and grit. She has had to contend with 101-degree fevers, heart palpitations, and a severe lack of appetite.

The hormone therapy to slow the growth of the tumor, leaves red blotches on her face and bone-dry patches along her jaw line.

"I have not yet made my peace with skin that doesn't look good," she said. She spends much of her free time in hunting for news about thyroid cancer. She is writing a book about living with the disease.

Radiation can cause what looks and feels like a sunburn on the area that the beam passes through to get to cancerous cells. Chemotherapy can make the skin and lips feel dry and itchy because it indiscriminately tries to damage all fast-growing cells, including skin cells.

Kairol heard a radio ad for Lindi Skin, a skincare line of products designed for cancer patients. Several companies now make skincare products for cancer patients.

Depending on who you ask, such products give patients one more tool to ease side effects, or a false hope that a costly lotion will be more effective than a mild drugstore lotion.

Oncologists and dermatologists are now looking into these products because cancer-fighting drugs called targeted therapies can cause rashes so severe that some patients threaten to drop out if they are left untreated. As of now, there is no scientific study that shows these products are any better than less expensive and less glamorous products like Cetaphil or CeraVe.

Yet some patients prefer them. Dianne Dassa, a breast cancer patient in New York, said the Lindi body wash and serum helped heal her radiation burn and her psyche. And "they were so beautifully packaged, I felt like I was getting a gift."

Advice: As a gift, you can give the fancy lotions to the cancer patient you care for. Cancer patients themselves can buy the less expensive drugstore products that have been shown to be effective.

Read a story of an entrepreneurial cancer survivor.

Thanks to Kayleen Schaefer for the source article in today's NY Times.