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Click here to visit the new home of Politics Daily!My friend Julie Levine had everything I lacked: A charmed childhood, beautiful kids. I might have envied her had she not been the nicest person I ever met. And, therefore, a magnet for cancer. (On an Internet bulletin board I once frequented, we joked that compassion and a zest for living were risk factors.) Julie is eight years younger than me, so I assumed she would someday speak at my funeral. Especially once I received a diagnosis of stage III ovarian cancer in 2001. Julie came to my hospital room. She took me to chemo. She and her mother came to my house bearing brisket, fudgy peanut ...
It seems like yesterday. It seems like a hundred years ago. After my friend Linda Elizondo died of cancer last week, her sister-in-law sent me an old photograph which, she thought, captured Lindy's joie de vivre. "A magical life cut short," Lindy's sister-in-law wrote, "but lived on her own fierce terms." I had taken the picture 35 years ago. I don't remember taking it. Not a very natural pose. (Is it any wonder I didn't last long in photojournalism?) What is Lindy doing? What's with the unopened bottle of wine leaning against her leg? The answers are lost to history. Except for the color ...
For a moment in time, she was pediatric resident Dr. Marnie Rose at Memorial Hermann in Houston. I got to know her a little during my first, tumultuous year of recovery from ovarian cancer. Dr. Rose was on TV. Back in those days I was combing the schedule for any reality show that slithered its way to the tube. There among the dreck of the early 2000s (guilty pleasures "Mr. Personality," et al., I'm looking at you) was the lovely Ms. Rose in "Houston Medical," an ABC show that featured doctors, patients and their families. The program, shot over the course of a year, ran for six episodes in ...
All day Friday, I was dragging around the house, and I put this in my Facebook status line: "Starting from zero, got nothin' to lose." That's from the 1988 hit song "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman. The first time I listened to this tale of poverty and longing, I cried. If ever there was an anthem for my sad, white-trash childhood, this was it. It would not be appropriate to use a public forum to detail my late father's crimes against humanity, so here's the Cliff Notes version: Today he probably would have gone to jail, but times being what they were, instead he got electroshock ...
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