Brooke and Keith Desserich say they never intended to write a book about their daughter.
It started as a parent's personal journal to their younger daughter Gracie, so she would be able to remember her 6-year-old sister, Elena, who was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer.
"They told us at the very beginning that she had 135 days to live," Keith Desserich said.
Though her parents didn't want her to know the severity of her cancer, they feel that she must have known what was happening. The tumor slowly took away her ability to talk.
But Elena was still able to write.
"That was her way to letting us know everything would be OK," Brooke Desserich said.
After Elena passed away, her parents discovered that their daughter had left a message behind for them -- a lot of messages, actually.
"We started to pull out notes and they would be in between CDs or between books on our bookshelf," Keith Desserich said.
Then the couple started finding them everywhere.
"We started to collect them and they would all say 'I love you Mom, Dad and Grace.' We kept finding them, and still to this day, we keep finding them," Keith Desserich said. "Literally, there are hundreds of notes that we found."
Elena’s parents each hold onto a sealed note they've never opened.
"We always want to know that there’s one more note that we haven't read yet," Keith Desserich said.
There's more, but I've got something in my eye and I can't post about this anymore.
WASHINGTON -- Federal officials are refusing to release a scientific study that contains "alarming evidence" that toxic pollutants threaten the health of residents in Detroit and other Great Lakes cities, a watchdog group alleged Thursday.
The Center for Public Integrity released on its Web site excerpts of the report, which includes information on elevated cancer levels in Wayne and Macomb counties and a Detroit landfill site that contains up to 17 tons of toxic PCBs.
The center said Thursday that the 400-page document was set to be released in July, but was rejected by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who said it was incomplete. [...] The report was compiled by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a part of the CDC, at the request of the International Joint Commission, an independent board of Canadian and U.S. officials that monitors water quality in the Great Lakes.
The Center for Public Integrity cited emails within the agency, and a letter from the chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, that raised concerns that the report was being withheld improperly and that Bush administrations including Julie Gerberding, the head of the CDC, had interfered with the work of government scientists.
Gee, would that be the same Julie Gerberding, an appointee of a Bush appointee? The Julie that failed upward after doing such a most excellent job of leading the CDC´s response to the anthrax bioterrorism in 2001? (BTW, how's that whole investigation going? What investigation? Exactly.)
A congressional committee is investigating "disturbing allegations" that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suppressed critical information about cancer dangers posed by trailers housing Hurricane Katrina victims.
The committee also is looking into whether the Atlanta scientist who sought to make the risks public has been the subject of retaliation by the agency. [...] De Rosa had been head of the division of toxicology and environmental medicine in CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry since 1992. He was removed from that job last fall and assigned the title of "special assistant."
Though CDC said De Rosa was simply reassigned, he said in an interview that he's been demoted. De Rosa said the public should be concerned about what's transpired.
"The very people they're looking to for answers have been censored," he said.
At issue is whether the agency intentionally delayed or avoided examining the long-term cancer threat posed by formaldehyde fumes in trailers purchased by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house victims of the August 2005 hurricane. FEMA initially said air quality in the trailers was safe if they were properly ventilated. [...] De Rosa said Friday that he raised his concerns about formaldehyde, the Great Lakes report and other issues through proper channels within the CDC.
"It's sort of like speaking truth to authority. I knew I was doing it at my peril," he said.
Then, in what investigators said was apparently retaliation, De Rosa was removed from his managerial job and in October given an "unsatisfactory" job performance assessment. Before, De Rosa said, he had received good to excellent ratings.
NASA, FEMA, CDC, EPA, FBI, DOJ ... these are jut a few of the Federal agencies that have had career professionals expert opinions censored by the Bush regime, and if the professionals spoke out they were demoted or fired, and slimed.
Maybe next year we can do something to reverse this trend. A good start would be investigations followed by prison time.
posted by Bill Arnett @ 12:01 PM Permalink In the below post of this title, I speculated how long it would take to count the three trillion dollars Americans are going to lose in home equity during the next two to three years.
I said 9,600 based upon something I read saying it would take 32 years to count to ONE BILLION dollars, and in a flash of cognizance last night, I realized that I was wrong.
32 x 1000 x 3 would, of course, total 96,000 years, not 9,600. I slipped a gear again.
I wish I could just say math had never been my strong suite, but that wouldn't be true, as I was once in a program for gifted and talented children in Florida and did Algebra 1 & 2 in the fifth and sixth grades respectively.
That was way before Agent Orange graced me with two very, very near fatal cancers, followed by years of chronic pain and a complete breakdown that robbed me of several large pieces of my mind, memories I will never recover, and gave me a life consigned to taking lots and lots of medications that do help, but can't put my mind back together again, kinda like good ole Humpty-Dumpty, etc. Far better still than the alternative though, death, about which I cannot speak of from personal experience thankfully.
So sometimes I err in ways a schoolchild would not and I do apologize for it. I do NOT wish for anyone's sympathy, but I would like our readers to know that I'm not completely stupid, and that the stupid part of me was sponsored by the U.S. Government.
So there you have it. (And that's still a very long time to spend counting money.)
posted by Bill Arnett @ 1:24 PM Permalink Holocaust survivor and Chairman of the House Committee for Foreign Affairs, Tom Lantos, has just announced that he is retiring due to esophageal cancer.
I have always admired Rep. Lantos, he's an exceptional person who has survived that which killed so many during WWII, and I wish him and his family well in his fight with this cancer.
I think once you've been there and done that, as I have, and so many millions of others (different cancers but same point), you develop an extra sense of sadness mixed with hope mixed with despair mixed with anger that we have so poisoned our world that millions more will die from being afflicted by all too common cancers.
This truly saddens me. The potential loss of an exceptional man always does.
1.(sometimes capital letters 'V' and 'S' with no space) a style of writing or saying something using emotion and/or logic and snark, esp. in order to elucidate the obvious while pretending to be objective.
2. anything written by The Vidiot, The Sailor, Mr. Vidiot and anyone else they allow to post on the blog “vidiotspeak”
[Origin: loosely based on new + speak, coined by George Orwell in his novel, 1984 (1949)]
And for godsakes, stay away from FOX, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC.
It's ALL CRAP!!!
Watch the BBC news or ITN news instead.
"POSSE COMITATUS ACT" (18 USC 1385)
A Reconstruction Era criminal law proscribing use of Army (later, Air Force) to "execute the laws" except where expressly authorized by Constitution or Congress. Limit on use of military for civilian law enforcement also applies to Navy by regulation. Dec '81 additional laws were enacted (codified 10 USC 371-78) clarifying permissible military assistance to civilian law enforcement agencies--including the Coast Guard--especially in combating drug smuggling into the United States. Posse Comitatus clarifications emphasize supportive and technical assistance (e.g., use of facilities, vessels, aircraft, intelligence, tech aid, surveillance, etc.) while generally prohibiting direct participation of DoD personnel in law enforcement (e.g., search, seizure, and arrests). For example, Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachments (LEDETS) serve aboard Navy vessels and perform the actual boardings of interdicted suspect drug smuggling vessels and, if needed, arrest their crews). Positive results have been realized especially from Navy ship/aircraft involvement.
