Sick Celebs and the Web Site That Loves Them

I flew home from the Midwest earlier this week and on the first leg of the trip, an announcement came over the intercom. Was there a doctor or a nurse in the house – uh, plane?

The woman next to me hopped out of her seat, as did three others, so I didn’t bother joining the crowd at the rear of the plane. I peaked back a couple of times and it didn’t appear that there was anything urgent happening. When my seatmate returned, I had to ask about the sick passenger. I admit it; I was very curious, so I asked diplomatically. She answered diplomatically, which means she didn’t tell me a whole lot.

“We asked her (the sick passenger) what medications she was on and she told us,” revealed my seat mate, who later told me she was a post-op open-heart nurse, “and then she told us that she hadn’t taken her medications this morning. No reason; just didn’t take them.”

Not very exciting, but still, the nurse didn’t give me the details I wanted.

Well, bravo for her.

She was protecting the privacy of the patient, which is exactly what she should have done. But you can’t blame another nurse for wanting to know, can you? Maybe I should blame part of my curiosity on the reporter/journalist in me, and given my first profession, it’s difficult not to be interested.

I think even those not in the medical professions are curious when it comes to others’ health or lack thereof – although sometimes people tell us more than we want to know! In any case, two Boston physicians (husband and wife) apparently have capitalized on the voyeur in each of us and have created a Web site called CelebrityDiagnosis.com. They use the news, they say, to create teachable moments.

After reading about the site in a magazine, I went straight there and was initially disappointed. The home page is a colorless presentation with a quiz about the ailments and dispositions of well-knowns – from the Farrahs to the physicists to the football players.

The other element of the site is the blog.

It’s more interesting, with photos of celebs, their illnesses and circumstances, and an explanation of the maladies. I didn’t know that singer Natalie Cole had a kidney transplant, that teen singing sensation Nick Jonas was a type 1 diabetic, or that Rachel Ray had to keep her mouth shut after undergoing an excision of a benign nodule from her vocal cords.

For all those medical headlines you missed, there’s an extensive index on the right side of the blog where you can find all the past blogs about sick stars. It is categorized according to illness.

It’s news to me that Dom DeLuise died in May of complications of obesity and that cartoonist Scott Adams (Dilbert) suffers from the rare communication disorder spasmodic dysphonia. And I was saddened to learn that Jerri Nielsen Fitzgerald, MD, lost her fight against breast cancer. She was the amazing woman who diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer while serving at the Amundsen-Scott South Station in Antarctica in 1999. Severe weather conditions made it impossible for her to evacuate for eight months, so she had to perform a biopsy on herself. with the assistance of the station's welder. (Fitzgerald wrote about her experiences in “Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole.”).

What you’ll also find on the blog pages are quite a few ads – many from amazon.com hawking movies in which the celebs appeared, books by and about them, and links to all sorts of other sites and videos that come with more advertising. I don’t knock them for it; someone has to support the site and we can choose to ignore the advertising – although I admit that I sat through a commercial to see the 1984 video of Michael Jackson’s hair on fire.