Friday, September 01, 2017
Childhood cancer--a grandmother's guest blog
* * * *
Today is September 1st - the first day of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and I want to honor my #1 childhood cancer warrior, my smart, brave and beautiful granddaughter, Lily. Lily was first diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) on December 1, 2008 at the age of 7. When she was diagnosed, I wondered how we’d make it through the 2+ years of treatment. It was a hard journey with daily chemo, fevers, hospitalizations, missed school, and missed childhood experiences. However, she made it through and finished treatment in February of 2011. She had a skating party to celebrate. She then had over five years of building back her health.
She went from being behind her peers academically (missing a year and a half of school will do that!) to beginning her sophomore year of high school in 2016 in advanced classes and being an active member of the high school girls’ volleyball team. Then in September 2016, she started feeling unusually tired again, and she had unexplained back pain – back pain that was all too familiar to her. She tells me that she suspected what was wrong well before it was confirmed. Blood tests were done again, and we got the heartbreaking news that she had relapsed. There was less than half of one percent chance of relapse that many years off treatment, and yet it happened. Learning your child or grandchild has cancer is horrible! Learning they’ve relapsed is so much worse!
Larisa – Lily’s mom and my daughter – tells about receiving that phone call confirming the relapse. She had to tell Lily and her younger sister, Sophie. When she went into Lily’s room, Lily said, “It’s back, isn’t it?” Larisa confirmed that it was. Then she, Lily and Sophie hugged each other and sobbed together. They KNEW how bad the treatment had been the first time, and they knew that treatment for relapse would be so much worse. The odds of cure go significantly down with a relapse as well.
Any of us adults in the family would have swapped places with Lily in a heartbeat if we only could have. I begged God to let it be me instead of her. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Our only choice was/is to be there for her as much as possible as she travels this terribly rough road.
Lily’s relapse was diagnosed on a Friday, but her oncologist wanted to wait until Monday to start treatment. That meant we had a weekend. A weekend during which Lily had her hair highlighted because she wanted it to look pretty before she lost it. A weekend to be with her friends and family. I asked if Lily wanted a family dinner during the weekend. Lily said yes – as long as we were upbeat and didn’t talk about the relapse. She didn’t want everyone being sad or feeling sorry for her. So we invited the whole family over to our house for dinner that Sunday night. Lily chose the menu, and I bought a bunch of small pumpkins – thinking that decorating them and making jack-o-lanterns would be a fun activity for all the children. After dinner, we took the pumpkins to the front porch, and the children started drawing and carving faces.
Then Sophie asked if it would be okay is she smashed her pumpkin on the concrete walkway. Smashing pumpkins? Well – sure! Go for it! Within a few minutes, all the children - preschool through teens - were standing on the steps and smashing the pumpkins on the walkway. Pumpkin pieces were flying everywhere. Lily mostly watched and shook her head at the silliness. We adults watched and laughed at how enthusiastically even the youngest kids were throwing the pumpkins, but we also understood what was going on. Fear, anger, and uncertainty were being expressed via smashing pumpkins. It was a needed release. When they finished, the kids picked up all the pumpkin bits, and we all went back inside. It is a scene etched indelibly in my memory. The next morning, Lily entered the hospital, had surgery to install a port and receive spinal chemo - and began treatment again.
With her relapse, Lily was faced with another two years of treatment. Right now, she’s about half-way through the relapse protocol. Lily’s body has not dealt well with the new, more aggressive relapse chemo. She lost her hair three weeks in, and she’s gone through some rough and life-threatening reactions to the chemo. One chemo she tolerated well back in 2009, put her in anaphylactic shock this time. So far during this relapse treatment, she has had just about every unusual and extreme reaction in the books – and some not in the books. She has been a frequent topic for discussion at the oncology team meetings at the children’s hospital.
She is participating in a clinical trial (research study) and was randomized to the experimental arm of treatment that includes a new immunotherapy drug, blimatumomab. This drug was not available back in 2008 when Lily was initially diagnosed. The study involves three cycles of 28 days each of continuous IV infusion of the drug. Lily has to wear a backpack that contains the pump that keeps the drug going into her body through her Hickman line 24/7 for those 28 days. Surprisingly, Lily has responded well to the blimatumomab and, so far, her months on it have been two of her less sick months of treatment. The third and final cycle of blimatumomab is the next block on her treatment protocol. She will then have surgery to remove her Hickman line and install a new port. Then she'll continue with the rest of treatment.
She missed most of this past year (her sophomore year) of high school, but kept up with her school work thanks to her school’s amazing teachers who went so far beyond the call of duty to help her. And thanks, also, to the school district’s home-bound program (Thanks, Jojo!). She also took some classes online. She’s now into her junior year of high school and hopes to be able to attend more regularly, but that depends on how she does with the upcoming chemo.
When Lily was in the hospital during the early days of treatment in 2008, she told Larisa that she wanted to do something so other children wouldn’t have to go through such rough treatment. Out of that conversation, the Lily’s Garden Foundation at Vandy’s Children’s Hospital was begun. Lily’s goal was to help raise a million dollars for childhood cancer research. She reached that goal several years ago! Amazing! Lily didn’t stop at a million dollars, though. She continues working to raise money for childhood cancer research. She has become a proficient speaker for childhood cancer research. And there is a lot of exciting research going on right now! I'm very optimistic that Lily's dream of no childhood cancer will someday be realized.
Meanwhile, she still has another rough year of treatment ahead of her. She will finish treatment in September 2018. Incredibly, she will be a senior in high school then. Please continue to keep her in your prayers. She needs every one of them.
Lily was asked, "What can others do that would be helpful?" Her response: "Help bring awareness, and help raise money to find a cure." You can help Lily reach her goal of finding a cure; find out how by looking at her website: http://lilysgarden.org.
God bless you, Lily. You were dealt a rotten hand at age 7 and again at age 15 – and yet you handle it so well. I can't wait for our Northern Lights adventure as soon as you're finished with treatment and can travel again. You are my hero, and I love you to the moon and back!
Good bye to our bicycles
A lot of my past was donated this year--special dresses from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s even the 90s, my wedding dress made by my mother, my "mother of the bride" dress from 1993, my huge cat memorabilia collection, and now the bicycles.
Story of our bikes.
Thursday, August 31, 2017
Tolerance vs. Forbearance
"[Forbearance] implies patience, mutual respect, the extension of time, a certain latitude, and perhaps some affection that motivates a person to carry the burden of disagreement. In this sense, forbearance is less a momentary cease-fire than an active extension of concern for one another. "
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/august-web-only/healthier-approach-to-disagreement-in-church-begins-with-on.html
From the book, Forbearance: A Theological Ethic for a Disagreeable Church, by James Calvin Davis (Eerdmans, 2017).
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Houston strong
Building up vs. Tearing Down: Trump and Charlottesville, guest blog
by Jane M. Orient, M.D.
The President’s remarks that provoked an unprecedented storm of hate and outrage were made at a press conference about—infrastructure. President Trump explained why our infrastructure is in such terrible shape. There’s the permitting process that delays projects for years or decades, and causes costs to double, triple, quintuple, or more.
This resonated with me. My dad was a modestly successful general contractor. He built small commercial buildings like grocery stores, and affordable housing. He could have built more. “Old age and smashed feet” didn’t stop him. The city’s inspection process finally did. It was always a problem. He might have to sit around for days waiting for an inspector to deign to show up. Then the inspector could red flag a project just because he was having a bad day or felt disrespected.
So a man who built sound, durable buildings—who could and sometimes did do everything from surveying the land to digging the foundation to finishing the roof—whose livelihood was at risk if he did a bad job—was at the mercy of a government employee who might not know how to hold a hammer or even know the rules he was enforcing. It got worse and worse. Only the big guys who could afford lawyers and accountants, and who had “connections,” could stay in business. Houses got more and more expensive. And they got worse, not better. Most are now thrown together with sticks and stucco.
Big projects are far worse. The U.S. will never regain dominance in nuclear energy without a massive overhaul of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A plant that is built in 2 years in Taiwan can’t even get a permit in less than 10 years here. And that’s for a plant that is exactly the same as ones that have been functioning flawlessly for decades. If you have a really innovative design, one that would be even safer, it takes more than 3 years for bureaucrats to evaluate the proposal. Meanwhile, you can’t even build a prototype.
It’s like this for all industries here, including medicine. President Trump sent a signal that he was going to start cutting useless red tape. Would this be good for black people? Poor people? Industry? Taxpayers? Absolutely yes, yes, yes, and yes. It would be a start for making America great again.
But the signal set off panic among swamp dwellers: the 3 million bureaucrats who block productive work. The lobbyists who advocate for rules to crush little guys. CEOs of megacorporations who dread competition. And of course those who really don’t want America to be great, and politicians who keep their power by demagoguing on problems they themselves caused.
The hate-Trump, stop-Trump-at-all-costs media couldn’t allow people to learn about our infrastructure problems and what must be done to fix them. They needed a diversion. So they talked about a mob scene in Charlottesville, where part of the project to obliterate America’s history is happening.
A lot of good people object to tearing down monuments. But some bad folks you wouldn’t want to be associated with got a permit to hold a rally protesting the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee. A few hundred people might have waved their signs, listened to speeches containing offensive ideas, and gone home. But another group crashed the party, without a permit, to fight the last war against “Nazis,” wearing masks and scary costumes, armed with baseball bats. The police apparently let them in.
To me (and apparently to the President) it looked like violent agitators type 1 versus violent agitators type 2. But reporters called them, respectively, “white supremacists” and “protesters.” Social justice warriors, including CEOs and congressmen, are engaged in frenzied virtue signaling. The President supposedly didn’t condemn the type 1 agitators fast enough or harshly enough and suggested there might be a moral equivalence. The type 2 agitators, in this view, had a pure motive for beating people up and throwing things, whereas type 1 agitators were pure Evil.
Some type 2s carried Black Lives Matter signs. Black lives are indeed threatened, but not by swastika-waving misfits. These are their real problems:
- Crime. Thousands of blacks are killed by (mostly black) criminals, mostly in inner cities ruled by liberal Democrats for decades. Trump wants more effective law enforcement.
- Drugs. While authorities blame doctors, international drug cartels thrive under the protection of sanctuary cities, pushing heroin, carfentanyl, and other things you can’t get at Walgreen’s. Thousands are dying. Trump wants to clean up sanctuary cities.
- Abortion. More than 19 million black babies have been aborted since 1973; the rate is three times that of whites. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a rabid racist. Trump wants to decrease abortion.
- Poor medical care. The past 8 years of ObamaCare have brought huge cost increases and deterioration in availability and quality. Trump wants to repeal it.
- Disease and poverty. Over-regulation by environmental radicals, based on fraudulent science, has killed and keeps on killing millions of African Africans (from resurgent malaria since banning DDT), and the war on affordable energy will keep Africa mired in poverty. Americans are less affected—so far. Trump wants to restore reason and honesty to the EPA and other regulatory agencies.
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Antifa is the new KKK
Some things never change."
The American Spectator, Jeffrey Lord, August 29
When common sense reigns, lives are saved
When gang violence is reduced in our major cities, minority communities benefit the most because they are usually the victims. Democrats know this, but prefer the virtue signaling.
"Allowing officers to use their discretion when dealing with criminal aliens has been an effective tool in curbing crime. In 2008, former Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris revealed that a 24% decrease in homicides and a 26% decrease in auto thefts could be partly attributed to “a new immigration policy that allows our officers to use their discretion when dealing with criminal aliens” and “unprecedented cooperation between our investigative units and our state, federal, and local partners. (Maricopa County Attorney’s Office).” Border patrol contacts in the Tucson Sector reported that in the same fiscal year (2008 – October to September) they saw a 41% decrease in border apprehensions. Nevertheless, on July 24 the new restrictive immigration policy went into effect at the Phoenix Police Department at the request of an open borders coalition. Now officers can’t even use the term “illegal alien,” which has been officially replaced with “unlawfully present.”"
Judicial Watch, August 28
Monday, August 28, 2017
Monday Memories--sailing
Re-segregating the campus
"She offered up five strategies other professors can use to deconstruct white privilege in their own classes, such as making sure students know that their views on race will be challenged, “interrupting oppression” that occurs in classroom settings, an...d segregating students by race so they can have more productive dialogues about privilege." http://www.wnd.com/2017/08/white-shaming-is-new-rage-on-college-campuses/
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/us/black-commencement-harvard.html
Was Amerigo a racist?
https://www.biography.com/people/amerigo-vespucci-9517978
Hillsdale Pledge
We, the students of Hillsdale College, commit ourselves to diligent study and patient reflection. Having come to learn, we are proud to do so with integrity and will conduct ourselves with exemplary honor. As sacrifices past and present make possible our education, we too become stewards of this College for the generations yet to come. We pledge ourselves to the pursuit of truth, the love of the good, and the cultivation of beauty, for the sake of our minds and hearts and for an ennobled society. By so doing, we embrace the high calling of liberal education.https://www.hillsdale.edu/
.
Trump pardoned a civil servant; Obama drug dealers
But feminine clothing and accessories for men are encouraged in our culture--even the more drastic removal of male body parts and adding female hormones is encouraged. I don't get it. It mocks a violent criminal and violates his rights, but not a tennis athlete?
Sunday, August 27, 2017
The death of the Republican Party
BRENT BOZELL: "In January of this year, they formally controlled both houses of Congress and the executive branch. Every single thing they’d ever promised was now possible. They now had the power to enact every single spending cut they’d ever solemnly pledged. All those wasteful programs designed to fill the liberal sandbox — PBS, NPR, Planned Parenthood, NEH and the rest of the alphabet soup; all the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to multi-billion-dollar corporations; all of the hundreds of billions of dollars directed toward leftist social engineering — poof! All of it could come to an end with a stroke of a pen. They now had the power to restore fiscal tax sanity too. Remember the flat tax? The fair tax? Slashing the highest corporate taxes in the world? Giving you a tax break? All of it could be done with a snap of the fingers.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/27/exclusive-brent-bozell-the-slow-death-of-the-republican-party/
It's not what you think
Yet so many are naïve. How many people were subjected to vague references to bigotry or "the last 7 months" with a big sigh in today's Sunday services? The Democrats are leaderless and Republicans spineless.
“I want to talk to you about the manufactured moral crisis in this country right now, because that’s truly what’s going on,” said Buck. “We’re in the midst of a moral panic. A manufactured moral crisis and while a lot of us could just ignore it, it will have ramifications. It should be met on the battlefield of ideas and blown to smithereens.”http://bucksexton.com/buck-liberals-creating-manufactured-moral-crisis-in-america/
“This is very dangerous stuff, he added. “This notion that we have to go back and erase, eliminate, re-write, pave-over, whatever it may be, different parts of history has got to stop. It feels incredibly soviet –because the soviets did exactly this kind of thing. It feels very totalitarian –because totalitarian regimes are quite concerned with the past as a means of controlling the future.”
President Trump condemns bigotry
"I just met with FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into the deadly car attack that killed one innocent American and wounded 20 others. To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered.
And as I have said many times before: No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God. We must love each other, show affection for each other, and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry, and violence. We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans.
Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, AND OTHER HATE GROUPS THAT ARE REPUGNANT to everything we hold dear as Americans.
We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our Creator. We are equal under the law. And we are equal under our Constitution. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America. . . ." August 14, 2017, President Donald Trump
Trump pardons Sheriff Joe
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/348061-trump-pardons-arpaio
Saturday, August 26, 2017
What are the specific charges?
I see the charges and claims on social media and in the Bezo-WaPo/NYT/cable news cabal that Trump is a racist. I haven't seen or heard actual racism or specifics, just the charges.
- Is it his slogan, "Make America great again," and you don't know any great black people or communities or leaders so you think he's leaving out people of color?
- Are you afraid that black citizens will take your job, so you want to frighten them?
- Is it the Islamist terrorism warnings, the incidents Obama ignored and called work place violence?
- How many drone killings without trial has Trump ordered? Obama did that for some Islamists who were American citizens and they were quite frequent in Yemen according to the Guardian before Trump was elected.
- Are Mexican gangs afraid they won't get sanctuary in Democrat run cities so they can kill more Mexican immigrants?
Mona Lisa smiles
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mona-lisa-smile-2003
Ebert opines: "Julia Roberts is above all an actress with a winning way; we like her, feel protective toward her, want her to prevail. In "Mona Lisa Smile," she is the conduit for the plot, which flows through her character. The major supporting roles are played by luminaries of the first post-Julia generation, including not only Dunst, but Julia Stiles as Joan Brandwyn, a girl smart enough to be accepted by Yale Law but perhaps not smart enough to choose it over marriage; Maggie Gyllenhaal as Giselle Levy, who is sexually advanced and has even, it is said, slept with the studly young Italian professor, and Ginnifer Goodwin as Constance Baker, who is too concerned about her looks."
It was certainly better than this Rolling Stone review: "The girls are played by a who's who of young Hollywood womanhood — Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal — each given one emotion to play and each forced to stare at Roberts in awe for showing them the way. That Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Four Weddings and a Funeral) directed this insulting swill is beyond depressing. Women of the Fifties, rise up in protest."
https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/history-versus-her-story/Content?oid=914311
http://www.threemoviebuffs.com/review/mona-lisa-smile.html
D'Souza knows racism
"Part of the Democrats’ big lie is to shift the blame for slavery from themselves to the South. This licenses leftist intimidation, vandalism and even violence in the name of fighting Southern bigotry. But let’s remember that most Southerners did not own slaves. Most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves. Let’s also recall that the Northern Democrats led by Stephen Douglas supported slavery with the same resourcefulness and determination as the Southern Democrats."
