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Kennedy has malignant brain tumor
By adamg on Tue, 05/20/2008 - 1:16pm
Malignant glioma, treatment consists of radiation and chemotherapy, but outlook is grim.
Information on malignant glioma from the National Cancer Institute: "The outlook for patients with malignant gliomas is poor." More from the Journal of the AMA.
Dan Kennedy, however, notes that Arlen Spector has been serving in the Senate since the 1990s despite battling various types of cancer, including a brain tumor.
Photo by Will White.
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Comments
ted kennedy
when i was a little guy (in the 70's) my father took me to a political rally in newton.i guess in the 70's little kids could get separated from the parents without something terrible happening. i just remember crying and asking somebody to find my daddy.ted kennedy picked me up, brought me up to the podium and made an announcement that i was lost and looking for my dad. i was too young to realize who he was but i remember my dad telling my mom when we got home and then telling everyone else for the next 30 years.
my prayers go out to sen kennedy and his family. i lost my dad to cancer four years ago and i know how difficult it can be.
A punch in the stomach
It took the wind right out my sails to hear this terrible news. My bet would be that our Senator will live with this a good long time longer than anyone expects.
Ted
I find it odd that all major news blogs will not allow anything bad to be said about Ted Kennedy. But I am going to say something anyway--I find it hypocritical of him to be given the best medical care, being whisked away in helicopters inorder to avoid long waiting hours in an ER and to basically say to the health care work he has apparently done over the years, "who cares, I actually need help now and I can't be kept waiting on an HMO type system!" I honestly feel he should be put through the motions any typical American would have to go through in this situation.
I personally have had eleven brain surgeries for my tumor, but some of them were cancelled because of my lack of health coverage and at other times business office representatives would come knocking on my ICU door demanding 400,000 dollars for unpaid neurosurgery bills. I was shunted around and around, and had to wait and wait to get MRIs, to get admitted, to get diagnosed, to get a biopsy, and this guy gets diagnosed in 48 hours???
Not right Ted! Not at all!
http://www.theidaexpress.com
Ida
I'm sorry to hear about your troubles and understand your anger.
I know its unfair that those who can afford it get the finest medical care, our health care system is obviously broken, but I wish the Senator nothing but the best.
He helped me once when I was sick and had no insurance, and I'll be forever grateful to him. All my family had to do was ask, and he was there for us. Didn't know us from a hole in the wall.
Senator Kennedy has been working to change the system for a long time and actually practices what he preaches. I'm living proof.
The median is not the message
One reason for the "typical" or "average" survival in years: advanced age at diagnosis. There are other factors involved here that could make "average" into "meaningless", such as the difference between population metrics and individual experience.
See also Steven Jay Gould's essay on his own experience with cancer and the idiocy of statistics that are used to prescribe a prognosis rather than describe a risk distribution.
Unless this is a glioblastoma or turns into one, he could actually live quite a long time - long enough to die of something else given his prior lifestyle and storied personal habits. Bear in mind that his mother lived more than a century.
I wish him all the luck to be a living lesson about "grim" and "average". I hope he was watching the game Lesterday evening, too.
Who do we send?
Assuming Ted wants to get out of politics sooner rather than later, who is the next Dem that the state is going to want to send in his place to the Senate?
I can't think of a candidate around the state right now who seems deserving of consideration.
the shortlist
joe.not my first choice but he has been laying low for a long time and theres still plenty of old ladies in this state.
I'd go with Barney Frank
He's one of the smartest guys around
in Massachusetts politics. I'd love
to see him in the Senate.
Good one
Wow, I had forgotten about Barney. Yeah, I could see myself putting Barney Frank in Ted's place if he wants to go to the Senate.
the downside
But if Frank goes to the Senate, he loses ALL of his seniority (including committee chairs) in the House. That would be quite a setback for Mass.'s clout there.
Ed Markey
Markey has a national profile.
He's also my rep, which makes him better for everybody than your rep, right?;-)
absolutely not
Why? Because the man is about as obsessed with "national security" (or lack thereof), and when he isn't screaming for lynchings, he's pontificating endlessly about how everything is vulnerable to terrorist attack. He falls squarely into the category of assholes who pander to ignorance and fear, rather than civil liberties.
Lynchings?
Um, try another description, please.
Then again, I tend to go on my actual interactions with a rep and his staff rather than read a bunch of Wired immaturity screeds.
Not a constituent, but ...
I've always found him to be kind of a pompous gasbag. He'd have to work a lot harder to convince me to vote for him than Frank (whom I also don't get to vote for).
Far more important, however, is that, despite the impression you'd get from the wall-to-wall TV coverage this afternoon, Ted Kennedy isn't dead yet!
Resisting Monty Python Retort Here ...
He isn't dead and he may yet live many years.
However, retirement is very likely at this point, given that most men his age are puttering around the garden anyway and he is facing serious down time in any possible future.
I tend to go off of his record
...like publicly demanding that a security researcher be arrested- a self-admitted knee-jerk reaction. He immediately and without so much as even bothering to look at the guy's website, issued an extremely inflammatory press release. It was careless, prejudicial, and self-aggrandizing.
He's happy to stand in front of TV cameras and pontificate about how we need more "security" at (insert some part of civil infrastructure), but he can't grasp the slightest nuances of security. His PR stunt with the boarding passes had a level of sophistication I'd expect from a half-drunk football player, not someone who actually sits on "homeland security" committees. Also, if he'd been paying attention, he'd know that a colleague had already shown how insecure boarding passes were.
paranoia.dubfire.net...congressman-calls-for-my-arrest.html
There would have to be a
There would have to be a special election between 145 and 160 days after he leaves office.
State law used to specify that the Governor would appoint an interim replacement, but the Democrats in the Legislature shamelessly changed the law in 2004 to maintain their stranglehold on power when it looked like Mitt Romney might get to appoint a Republican interim Senator if Kerry managed to get elected.
Not that it's really going to matter in this state.
How did that work out for
How did that work out for Kerry?
He didn't get elected. It
He didn't get elected.
It was in all the papers.
I actually voted for Kerry....
before I voted against him!
For the Sarcastically Challenged see:
cbsnews.com...2004/09/29/politics/main646435.shtml
Bulger's line about John Forbes Kerry was spot on: "JFK?
Just for Kerry!"
And this is pertinent to
And this is pertinent to what I mentioned, how?
Yeah, Arlen's really been a shining beacon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlen_Specter#Controv...
We have him to thank for all sorts of lovely civil liberty and balance-of-power problems.
Specter Had a Benign Growth
This is different.
Doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center used the ''gamma knife'' procedure to administer radiation on the benign growth near the left front part of his skull. His doctor, L. Dade Lunsford, the hospital's chief of neurosurgery, said the procedure was successful 98 percent of the time.
query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980...
dr.lunsford
must have left his i hate the patriots scalpel in specters head.
More Kennedy reaction
W. David Stephenson: We love you, Teddy!
Moxie recalls going to a Senate hearing in 2000:
Ed Deevy: As far a I am concerned the poor had no greater champion in the United States Senate than Senator Kennedy.
Margalit: This is devastating news to the people of Massachusetts, and to all Americans.
Julia Spitz: I hope this time their optimistic scuttlebutt turns out to be right.
Eileen: Best wishes to him for a complete and rapid recovery:
Littlestar: If praying is your thing, this may be a good time...
Marie: Our prayers are with the Senator, his family and all those who know and love this "liberal lion" and son of Massachusetts.
Scott Allen Miller wishes him well:
BostonMaggie: My only question - Does it hurt more than drowning?
Notice from Fatboy.cc
Notice from Fatboy.cc
Too much coverage?
Michael Page has been jumping from one station and network to another all afternoon and concludes:
But Brian is put out that Howie Carr is actually treading softly today:
I think Howie's bosses laid
I think Howie's bosses laid down the law before he went on the air. I think it was killing him. It was still entertaining.
I'm not proud, I listen to Howie every afternoon at work
He's local, actually understands how things work around
here. (Silly me, I took a job in the Dreaded Private
Sector. Who knew that those relatively low-paid public
sector salaries translated into damned good pensions
on the other end?)
I listened to him tonite just before they cut to
Red Sox pre-game. I thought that he was doing exactly
what talk radio should do--letting people talk.
Most of the callers had relatives that had suffered
the same or similar diseases. He let them talk about
it. Maybe it was bad Howie, but it was good radio,
given the news.
And defending himself wrt to taking the high road,
he said it was his own decision, because he doesn't talk
"to management" at WRKO. That was both good Howie and
good radio.
Given the choice, trashing Regan and Entercomm rather
than a suffering Teddy K. was certainly the way to go.
that explains it...
the pressure from the tumor on his brain was impacting his speech.... he really meant to endorse Hillary
They are easy to mix up you know
Their names even sound alike.