Unranked media power couple Bill and Emma Keller have discovered a question so pressing, so important to our time that they both felt the need to write a column in their respective papers about it in the same week. Is Lisa Bonchek Adams, a stage four cancer patient, having cancer wrong? According to the Kellers, the answer is "yes." 
 
 The biggest problem in their views, seems to be that Adams — who is aggressively blogging and tweeting about every aspect of illness and treatment — just won't be quiet about having cancer. 
 
 Emma Keller, who has had cancer herself, published a critical op-ed in the Guardian last Wednesday about Adams's Twitter feed. In it, Keller seems to be concerned about whether Adams's decision to publicly discuss her diagnosis and treatment is "dignified," both for Adams (who "is dying," according to Keller, even though this is a characterization Adams rejects), and for Emma Keller personally. You see, a particularly intense series of updates from Adams apparently ruined the Kellers' Christmas, because Emma couldn't stop reading what Adams wrote, and that gives her complicated feelings: 
 
 She could hardly breathe, her lungs were filled with copious amounts of fluid causing her to be bedridden over Christmas. As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn't stop reading – I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed? 
 
 But the Kellers' concern with how Adams is doing cancer actually goes deeper than Emma's reading habits. Keller's Sunday New York Times piece goes after the aggressive, no-holds-barred manner in which Adams has decided to pursue treatment for the disease. She is willing to try anything, no matter how risky, if it might prolong her life, instead of a more peaceful pain management and palliative approach that others have chose, like Keller's father-in-law. He died from cancer in the U.K., and Keller decides to compare Adams's approach (which he characterizes as "her decision to treat her terminal disease as a military campaign") unfavorably to that of his father-in-law's: 
 
 [In the U.K.] more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America. 
 
 For the record, the "military" metaphors Keller repeatedly associates with Adams's approach to treatment and choice to be public about it is a metaphor Adams herself soundly rejects. 
 
 To hear it from the Kellers, Adams's public engagement with cancer invites "judgement" as the "ethical questions abound," as Emma writes. Or, as Bill posits, "her decision to live her cancer onstage invites us to think about it, debate it, learn from it." Not only is it incorrect to assume that Adams's writing comes with an RSVP for judgement from Team Keller, it also appears that the Kellers aren't even looking closely at what they're attacking. For instance, Keller states that Adams has two children at home. According to her Twitter bio, Adams actually has three. They are young — 15, 11, and 7, as of last November. Although it should be obvious, it seems that the Kellers forgot to notice that Adams is neither Bill Keller's father-in-law, nor is she a generic idea of a cancer patient. She is a person, pursuing treatment to extend her life, so that she can spend as much of it as possible with her kids. That is a different thing from refusing palliative — or pain management — care at the end of one's life, as Bill Keller seems to believe (erroneously) that Adams is doing. 
 
 And then there's Bill Keller's mini-investigative mission into the parts of Adams's medical treatment and prognosis that remain confidential. Keller apparently asked both Adams and her hospital to detail the financial costs of her treatment, so he could weigh it more accurately against his own assessment of whether it's worth it or not: "Whether or not this excellent care has added months or years to her life, as she clearly believes, is a medical judgment, and her doctors, bound by privacy rules, won’t say," he writes. The insinuation is that her choice to continue to treat her cancer after her stage four diagnoses "may raise false hopes." Keller thinks that such an approach "implicitly, seems to peg patients like my father-in-law as failures." 
 
 Except, is not what Adams is doing, as Adams herself said in response: 
 
 Again, let me make it clear. honest discussion and acceptance of the reality of diagnosis is what I have always been doing. READ MY WORK. — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 13, 2014 
 
 I've been doing exactly what he supports all along. If he'd actually been reading the posts. — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 13, 2014 
 
 Others have rightly responded with anger to the tag-team cancer-explaining (or "cansplaining," as Megan Garber put it in the Atlantic). Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin — who live-tweeted her own cancer diagnosis — took on Bill Keller's piece in particular. Her whole Twitter response to Keller is worth a read. But here are a few highlights: 
 
 Problems I have w Bill Keller's bullying NYT oped about @AdamsLisa, which oddly mirrors & follows his wife's earlier Guardian shitfest: — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014 
 
 14) “Lisa Adams’s choice is in a sense the opposite” of “my father-in-law’s calm death.” SHE'S ALIVE AS YOU CAN TELL BY HER FUCKING TWEETS. — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014 
 
 15) “there is something enviable about going gently” LADIES WITH METS SHOULD BE SEEN AND NOT HEARD. — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014 
 
 False hopes my ass! I remember the day she called me before my mastectomy, with pragmatic, calm, not-fun info. She told me a story. — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014 
 
 I am appalled on every level by Bill Keller's oped piece about @AdamsLisa. Astonishing. — Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) January 13, 2014 
 
 Meanwhile, Adams has taken a break from addressing the Kellers' concerns about Adams's life choices, because she is in the middle of a round of treatment . Luckily, she's got plenty of people online to respond for her. 
 
 Update: The Guardian has since removed the piece in question by Emma Keller, "because it is inconsistent with the Guardian editorial code." ||||| Last week at the Guardian, the writer Emma Gilbey Keller wondered aloud, “Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness?” Her commentary centered on the public presence of Lisa Bonchek Adams, who has blogged and tweeted her way through treatment for metastatic breast cancer. “As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn’t stop reading — I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism,” Keller explained. “Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?” 
 
 Keller’s rhetorical questions were met with anger and hurt from her audience, including Adams, and the Guardian has since removed the entire column, but not before she passed the obsession on to her husband, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller. 
 
 In the Times today, Mr. Keller picked up where his wife left off, likening Adams’s treatment and personal writing to “a military campaign” and contrasting her cancer fight with that of his father-in-law’s: “His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America,” Keller wrote. 
 
 I've written extensively on my hatred of war metaphors and cancer. — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 13, 2014 
 
 His point, like his wife’s, is underinformed and muddled in a mess of condescension toward Adams’s suffering and her work. In addition to factual errors, he described Adams as “a cheerleader for cancer research,” noting the research fund she helped start, but added, “Beyond that, whether her campaign has been a public service is a more complicated question.” Her writing was described as pecking, and so on: 
 
 “The words of disease become words my brain gravitates to,” she pecked the other day after a blast of radiation. […] … any reader can see that Adams’s online omnipresence has given her a sense of purpose, a measure of control in a tumultuous time, and the comfort of a loyal, protective online community. Social media have become a kind of self-medication. […] Her digital presence is no doubt a comfort to many of her followers. On the other hand, as cancer experts I consulted pointed out, Adams is the standard-bearer for an approach to cancer that honors the warrior, that may raise false hopes, and that, implicitly, seems to peg patients like my father-in-law as failures. 
 
 Adams responded in a huge, emotional string of critical tweets: 
 
 I don't know why I, a person dedicated to education and personal choice by cancer patients, have been so mischaracterized as lay in hospital — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 13, 2014 
 
 my dear family should not be subjected to this. Hope some of you can help me get this fixed. — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 13, 2014 
 
 As did Jeopardy! celeb Ken Jennings and Boing Boing blogger Xeni Jardin, who has written extensively about her own breast cancer: 
 
 Terrified I might get cancer, because what if Bill and Emma Keller yell at me. — Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) January 13, 2014 
 
 God forbid a person with metastatic cancer cope with it by telling people what it feels like and how the science works. — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014 
 
 Let the little lady peck her Tweets and receive her silly treatment. Real men know how to do cancer right: by dying offline. — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014 
 
 Even before her husband doubled-down on the unnecessary second-guessing, Ms. Keller’s column had problems. “Since this article was published two days ago, there’s been a lot of negative comment on Twitter and below the line. Lisa Adams herself was upset by it,” Emma Keller amended in an update on Friday. “I had been in communication with her a number of times in recent weeks; given her health, I could have given her advance warning about the article and should have told her that I planned to quote from our conversations. I regret not doing so.” The piece has since been taken down for quoting the private correspondence, “pending investigation.” 
 
 But beyond the potential journalistic malfeasance, the larger issue remains the discounting of one woman’s vast and varied experiences to make more general, misguided points about the types of treatment available or our culture’s urge to “overshare.” Adams is very much alive and has found an audience that values her personal journey as more than just voyeurism. Instead of using their respective positions of power to wrestle awkwardly with something that makes them uncomfortable, the Kellers could attempt to consider Adams’s online presence on its own terms, or just unsubscribe. 
 
 Update: “Some of the reaction (especially on Twitter, which as a medium encourages reflexes rather than reflection) has been raw, and some (especially in comments posted to the article online, where there is space for nuance) has been thoughtful and valuable,” Bill Keller told Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, who took on the issue in a post this afternoon. “I think some readers have misread my point, and some – the most vociferous – seem to believe that anything short of an unqualified ‘right on, Lisa!’ is inhumane or sacrilegious. But I’ve heard from readers who understood the point and found it worth grappling with.” ||||| The diagnosis 
 
 I have breast cancer. A week ago, I had breast cancer, and the week before that, and the week before that. Maybe five, eight, even ten years ago, the first bad cell split inside me, secretly. But I didn't know. This is how I arrived at knowing. 
 
 Two friends of mine were recently diagnosed. When news of the first came, I felt sadness. When news of the second came a few weeks ago, I felt a different kind of shock. I'd never had a mammogram. Even though I was ten years younger than the time they say you need to start, it felt like time to start, and when her news came I thought: I need to do this right now. For my friends, for me. Solidarity. Something small I can do, some little action against the big unknowable that swoops down without warning and strikes the ones we love. 
 
 Around the same time, I'd became aware of a funny stiffness in a spot on my own body. But anomalies in women's bodies come and go all the time, and it was a fluid whatever-thing, something that would pass, definitely not a lump, nothing that my waking, speaking mind would grasp as danger. This anomaly must be misplaced anxiety, my logic-brain tried to explain to my lizard-brain; maybe it's me wanting to make my friend's bad news all about me. 
 
 I called my insurance company for a clinic referral, then dialed a few places on a list the guy in their Indian call center emailed. Over the phone, the clinics all sounded like places you'd take a pork chop to be examined, not a human breast, not a person, and not me. I googled around and found a place with a lot of stars on Yelp and other online ratings services from women who'd gone and felt they'd been treated well. Pink Lotus Breast Center. The women who answered the phone there sounded cool. I made an appointment. 
 
 I live online as much as I live offline. Often, I move around in the world staring into a device as I walk, sharing bits of one realm with the other. The morning I went in for my first mammogram, I felt nervous. I would tweet this new thing, like I do with lots of new things, and make the unknown and new feel less so. Maybe by doing so, I thought while I was driving, other women like me who'd never done this would also feel like it was less weird, less scary, more normal and worth doing without hesitation. I'd crack some 140-character jokes. I'd make fun of myself and others. I would Instagram my mammogram. 
 
 The women at the front desk were kind and welcoming. Both were from Virginia, like me. One of them is from the back-country part where there's still no internet. Her dad and uncle work the fields. We talked about growing corn and hogs, how they still make cane molasses with a horse-drawn grinder, and about poor white Appalachian babies nursed on Mountain Dew. 
 
 The mammogram technologist saw on my chart that I'd lost a loved one to ALS. She had too. I hugged her, and she hugged back. She folded my body into the machine, pressed some buttons, folded me another way, and the machine clicked and whirred and clicked and whirred. Then it was over. She told me to wait. 
 
 I tweeted the waiting. Inviting the internet in is something I do every day anyway, but this time it was like a shield. Nothing bad can happen in a new place if you're cracking jokes and 50,000 people are watching. You're safe out here, in here, out here. 
 
 The waiting-moment stretched out, and out, and out, and finally she returned. 
 
 Where was that thing you felt that isn't anything, she asked? 
 
 Here, I showed her. 
 
 Put your arms in the air, she said. She felt, and squinted, and her brow furrowed, and she stepped aside again. Then she returned. Come back in a few hours when the doctor is free, she said, and we'll look a little more closely with ultrasound, just to be thorough. She smiled. Maybe just go have some lunch, she said, and we'll wrap this up when you return. 
 
 The hours stretched out and out and out. I felt nervous, but it was still all normal. I was too nervous to eat, but not too nervous yet to tweet. A finger pulling down the iPhone touchscreen still yielded replies from familiar names, and this was all going to end well. I drove back to the clinic. 
 
 Dr. Kristi Funk is her name. How can anything go bad when the doctor's name is Funk, and there are so many funny things to tweet? She told me to lie down, put some goop on my chest, and waved a wand through the goop. The waves appeared on a screen. It looked like NASA video, something the Mars rovers might transmit home to a JPL engineer searching for distant water. 
 
 She showed me a crater in the waves, a deep one, with rough edges and a rocky ridge along the northern rim. Calcification. Badly-defined boundaries. Not the lake we'd hoped to find. 
 
 "The first thing you're going to learn about working with me is that I'm a straight shooter," Dr. Funk said. Her voice was steady and reassuring. 
 
 "That's how you know you can trust me. I'm going to tell you everything, and I'm going to tell it to you like it is." 
 
 I forget the rest of what she said, but it added up to this: the crater was cancer. 
 
 As the words sank in, the Mars rover crawled over another steep ridge, out of the crater and into a valley, and found one of my lymph nodes, larger and darker than the others. A rocky prominence. A sentinel node. No water there, just fast-dividing cells that kill. 
 
 I believe that we are looking at breast cancer, and that it has spread to one of your lymph nodes, she said. We're going to do a biopsy right away to confirm and learn more. 
 
 Another woman came in, and held my hand. Dr. Funk shot the biopsy gun in the air first so I wouldn't be afraid of the sound. That's when the shaking started and my heart started pounding. 
 
 I cried, but someone else was doing the crying, someone else was doing the shaking, someone else was lying there, and now the gun was diving in to someone else's flesh to bring back rock samples from outer space for the lab to analyze. 
 
 The shaking didn't stop. I tried to dial the people I loved on my iPhone with one hand while the assistant held down my other arm, pushing cotton into the place where the probe dove in for samples, where blood was now coming forth. 
 
 My fingers were cold and shaking, and I couldn't hit the numbers on the screen. When I finally got through, someone else's voice was coming out of my mouth, and it was taking forever for the stuttery radio transmissions to beam through space, from the cold planet I was lost on, way out here, far from home. 
 
 Treatable, curable, survival odds, margins, chemotherapy, surgery, radiation. Someone else's problems, someone else's words. The biopsy came back the next day. Those words became my own. 
 
 I do not know all of what's ahead. I know a little. I know that there is a new kind of life on the other side of this thing. A changed mind and body. A new appreciation of time, and breath, and health, and life, and loved ones. 
 
 The gravity in this place is different. I've spoken to others who've traveled out here, too, and returned home safely. When you become one of them, you learn quickly that you share a language others can't understand. 
 
 The trick, these fellow travelers tell me, is to accept the not knowing and find your equilibrium in that new gravity. Calm the mind. Find your balance out on the cold planet, whether or not you know the next step, or the date of the next appointment, or what good or bad news the Technetium-99 isotopes floating around in your blood during the last scan reveal. 
 
 You must be at peace with not knowing, they tell me. That is how you get through outer space, and find your way back home. 
 
 The thing about this thing, or, at least, this first week of this thing, is how it takes you out there to the cold planet again and again and again, when you aren't expecting it. Long, undulating waves of fear pull you out to where you are alone and unreachable, even by words sent from the strongest satellite. 
 
 The thing that brings you back is love.
– Xeni Jardin, a co-founder of the Boing Boing website, had her first mammogram on Dec. 1, and she live-tweeted the whole process, as noted by Jezebel at the time. Jardin stunned her fans, however, when the results came in later that day: "I have breast cancer. I am in good hands. There is a long road ahead and it leads to happiness and a cancer-free, long, healthy life." Today, Jardin takes to Boing Boing to write of the diagnosis and what lies ahead, at one point likening the experience to being on a "cold planet" where the gravity is different. "The thing about this thing, or, at least, this first week of this thing, is how it takes you out there to the cold planet again and again and again, when you aren't expecting it," she writes. "Long, undulating waves of fear pull you out to where you are alone and unreachable, even by words sent from the strongest satellite. The thing that brings you back is love." The full column is well worth reading here.