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.”
– 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.