The Whispering Cancer - Part 2 - Monday Night Cancer Club

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Monday June 09, 2014 · 5:30 PM PDT

2014/06/09 · 17:30

Ovarian cancer, the whispering cancer, is a brutal teacher of epistemology—the investigation of “what distinguishes justified belief from opinion”. My gyn-oncologist knows cancer. I know myself having cancer. The intermixing of those two types of knowledge is—for me at least—challenging, because both have justification, which at times can be no more than an opinion to the other.

Vatexia for Monday Night Cancer Club

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Monday June 02, 2014 · 5:40 PM PDT

2014/06/02 · 17:40

This is my first contribution to this group, to which I owe so very much. I hope this will encourage you to share your own introductions to, and journeys with, this strange disease, whether it whispered or shouted.

It is called “the whispering cancer” because ovarian cancer has no distinct symptoms. In the year before the diagnosis, it seems to me I spent more time in doctors’ offices and had more x-rays and CT scans (head, chest, belly—but, for the belly, an x-ray, which cannot “see” ovarian cancer) than I have throughout the rest of my life. And yet, no one caught it until I went the rounds the second time with my complaints of constipation. Constipation! Late on a Wednesday afternoon a clinic physician I had never seen before palpated my belly, and had the nurse make me an appointment for a CT scan asap. The scan was Friday morning, and by Friday evening I was in the hospital talking to the gyn-oncologist, standing by my hospital bed in my hospital nightgown. Why didn’t I sit down? I don’t know.

Vatexia

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Friday March 01, 2013 · 9:31 AM PST

2013/03/01 · 09:31

The conventional wisdom is that Latham chose to avoid a bruising primary for Senate in order to concentrate on the congressional seat of IA 03, which Democrats might have won but now probably will not. The CW is probably right, but there are other ways of looking at this. Below the Sign of Orange Delight are some musings leading in another direction.

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The Whispering Cancer - Part 2 - Monday Night Cancer Club

The Whispering Cancer part 1 - The Monday Night Cancer Club

Latham, Iowa and 2013