Spring 40 Days for Life

Well it's the end of another 40 Days for Life Spring Campaign.  It wasn't that active, and it officially ended Sunday, March 20.  I've always considered it to end with the Good Friday Stations of the Cross in San Diego, which was on March 25 this year.

I've unfortunately had to stop going to the 40 Minutes for Life every fourth Sunday at 7 pm.  With the move from San Marcos to Vista getting down and back is much more difficult from Lakeside.  I'm pretty bummed about this, because a couple years ago I had a boss who went out of his way to keep me from going to pro-life events.  AFAIK he didn't know I was into that, but about the only days he would have me work were days I specifically asked off.  I was mentioning to a couple of co-workers that I was looking elsewhere, and maybe it got back to him, idk, but a day or two later he unexpectedly called me in on a day when I wasn't really up for working, and it affected my performance that night. As a result I had to look for work with the stigma of being unemployed, and by the time I found another job and was starting to get the hang of it some of my doctors were having questions about my health.

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"Love can be seen as the answer, but nobody bleeds for the dancer"--Ronnie James Dio (July 10, 1942 – May 16, 2010)

My dad's last day

As usual, I attended the 40 Minutes for Life vigil in San Marcos. There's also a possibility I may be working for GrubHub in July, though I have a couple of doctor's appointments.

I've mentioned elsewhere that I lost my dad in 2009 to a very severe form of Parkinson's disease that doesn't respond to the medication Parkinson's normally responds to. I recently found out some details of my dad's passing that weren't pretty, though I'd read enough to have had a good idea. He had gone into septic shock, possibly because of mesenteric necrosis, and had been rushed to the hospital.

I'd made the mistake of not visiting him that day. My back was bothering me, and the chairs at the nursing home were quite uncomfortable, and I was scheduled to work that night. From what I'd read he was pretty much out of it, and I didn't feel it would have been productive to visit him that particular day. Any other day that might have been the right call. My sister Catherine was the only one who was there that night. Dad deserved better. As for my back, I found out after he died that I had an old compression fracture of one of my vertebrae.

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"Love can be seen as the answer, but nobody bleeds for the dancer"--Ronnie James Dio (July 10, 1942 – May 16, 2010)

To those who have been following this blog

I have a new blog site at Wordpress.  I will keep this site active, but am presently sending new posts there.

Concerning contraceptive mentality

I recently attended the closing prayer vigil for the 40 Days for Life campaign in La Mesa, and there was a reception afterwards at a friend's house.  There was talk about how today's contraceptive mentality has paradoxically contributed to the abortion tragedy.  This may or may not be the case, but focusing on this concern can alienate those who see abortion as the taking of a human life, but happen to use birth control methods as part of their sex lives.  There has been concern about whether some contraceptive methods can be abortive at times, which I've discussed elsewhere in my blog.

40 minutes for Life, plus other things.

I took part in the 40 minutes for Life vigil at the Planned Parenthood clinic at the corner of Twin Oaks and Craven in San Marcos.  It just happens to be across the street from San Marcos State University.  I had to leave early, but I'll try to stay longer next time.  This activity was inspired by the 40 Days for Life vigils that take place twice a year, and takes place the last Sunday of the month.

This has been a rotten month.  On May 2, our cat was unexpectedly run over.  It was in a mobile home park, not the busy street.   A week later, my mom succumbed to angiosarcoma, which was drowning her lungs with fluid.  After we took her home from the hospital we had hospice care set up for her at home, where the hospice nurse had my sister Elizabeth give her the pain and sedative medications.  That was very hard on Elizabeth, and she was wondering if she was doing the right thing.  I asked on a Facebook support group for rare diseases if it was normal in hospice for the nurse to have the family members give these medications.  Someone on that group replied that it wasn't, but things developed too quickly for that answer to do any good.  My mom died the next day.  We had the funeral at St. Kieran's Church on the 18th, and a get-together afterwards.  We'll be having a private ceremony in a couple weeks where we'll place her ashes next to my dad's.

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"Love can be seen as the answer, but nobody bleeds for the dancer"--Ronnie James Dio (July 10, 1942 – May 16, 2010)

Some news

Mom will see her doctor tomorrow morning because she had some bleeding from her breast.   She has had a rare form of angiosarcoma that sometimes affects women with a history of breast cancer.   We were going to take her to the emergency room, but my sister Elizabeth cleaned her up and found the bleeding didn't seem as extensive as we first thought, so she'll be seeing her doctor in the morning around 8.  I'll try to keep everyone posted.
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"Love can be seen as the answer, but nobody bleeds for the dancer"--Ronnie James Dio (July 10, 1942 – May 16, 2010)

More on the need for pro-life unity

I attended the 40th anniversary for Roe v. Wade vigil at the corner of Grape and Harbor again this year. There weren’t quite as many people as there have been the past few years, possibly because there was a Walk for Life a few days earlier, which I unfortunately didn’t feel I could attend. As usual, people driving by honked, in some cases as a show of support, others as hostility. We had a few people screaming “pro-choice” and from one car they shouted obscenities.

This makes it all the more reprehensible when pro-lifers belittle one of their own, but this has happened, and both liberal and conservative pro-lifers are guilty of this.

In an earlier post I mentioned having run into a couple of friends, Sue and Tim House. They were at this rally, and I thought I saw someone else there, someone who treated me rather badly many years ago. (at the time, it didn't help that I'd just read literature that the Pill might be abortive.)  There were others like her, and I eventually left pro-life for a few years because of people like that. For better or worse during my absence the movement became much more reactionary.