A breast cancer survivor's interview: To wring their perfectly coiffed head

Question by Karen Weintraub: You talk about getting a lot of strength from other people going through treatment, people you met in hospital waiting rooms and elsewhere.

Answer by Kelley Tuthill: For me, that was a constant theme of being sick. There was always somebody who was dealing with something far more challenging than I was facing. You say, if they can face this, I certainly can do this.

Q. Was it challenging to be so public about your disease?

A. It was an incredibly positive experience to go out in Boston and have people say - even today - "how are you doing?" The flip side is some pain that the public feels, they share with me, and that's difficult, too. By going public, I've had opportunities to try to do something about [my frustration with the lack of a cure]. My coping mechanism is to try to help.

Q. Do you have any advice for people whose friends or loved ones are going through treatment now - things they shouldn't say to cancer patients?

A. That "you have the perfect head for being bald." If one more person told me that, I was going to wring their perfectly coiffed head! People mean well, but you go: Really? Really? I don't think so.

Q. People with life-threatening diseases often talk about how the challenge made them stronger. Was that your experience?

A. My life is better than it was five years ago, hands down. I appreciate life more. I have so many amazing people in my life now - and that's because of breast cancer.

Read another story about a breast cancer survivor. Thanks to Karen Weintraub for her interview of Kelley Tuthill, excerpted here from the G Section of today's Boston Globe.

There is a moon shot here: Don Berwick's exit from CMS & the irrationing of healthcare

In my blog post yesterday, I mentioned the sometimes ridiculously high cost of healthcare, and the resulting lack of coverage for many people.

No one wants rationing of healthcare; rationing connotes a period of barely adequate consumption in a time of war. Yet coming from the same root as "rational," rationing is the product from a conscious effort to equally and fairly share a limited resource.

Our high prices create "irrationing." Think of the harm to Deamonte Driver, a boy with a gap in his Medicaid coverage, who eventually died from an untreated toothache, to Nikki White, a young woman with cancer who was denied benefits by her insurer for her pre-existing condition of lupus, and to Natoma Canfield, an uninsured woman whose cancer was detected far too late, among far too many others. That's irrationing; irrational, needlessly cruel and jarringly wrong for the richest and greatest country on earth.

In 2009, Dr. Don Berwick told a biotechnology journal, "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care - the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open."

Now, as he exited his leadership role over the Medicaid and Medicare programs, Dr. Berwick said, just as Americans supported manned missions to the moon without knowing the details of rocket science, they ought to support the universal health insurance law because of its ultimate destination. "We are a nation headed for justice, for fairness and justice in access to care," Dr. Berwick said. "We are a nation headed for much more healing and much safer care. There is a moon shot here."

Thanks to Robert Pear for his interview in today's New York Times.