Re: Protest Event Thursday evening

We took part in a vigil to protest Planned Parenthood's 49^th annual fundraising dinner at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel on Park and Harbor Drive by the bay.  There were a bit more people this time than the last time I was there (though not as many as had been at the "Cocktails for Choice" dinner near 30^th and Upas).  Roger Lopez, Pat Hansen, and Elena di Ventra were there along with about forty others.  Sue and Tim Houze, who I knew years ago, were there, I'd last run into them at USD a few months ago.  We held up a lot of the graphic signs.  One of my favorite signs is the "Abortion Kills Children" sign, which has no pictures.  Here's an interesting picture I saw on Facebook. 

Mom will be getting back the results of her biopsy next Monday to see if her angiosarcoma has returned.  They had earlier checked for masses with ultrasound, but they still want to do this.

In the news, Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng has told the Associated Press that his situation is dangerous and American officials and friends have been blocked from seeing him, and even beaten up when they tried to visit him.  Chen is the blind activist who has called attention to China's forced abortion policy, where pregnant women who already have a child are arrested, restrained, and forced to undergo mandatory abortions, regardless of how far along they are. I wonder if we shouldn't go back to calling that country "Red China".

The start of 40 Days for Life

I went to the 40 Days for Life Kickoff vigil in El Cajon last night.  There were I guess about 40 people there including a few regulars.  I also went to the kickoff vigil in Miramar earlier tonight.as well, and there were I think about 60 people. Roger Lopez and Dr. Delgado were among the speakers. LifeNews and LifeSiteNews have also covered the start of the campaign.  I was away from pro-life for far too long, but at the same time pro-life often seems empty now with my dad gone these past few years.  I try to remember a prayer verse which goes, "There's nothing that destroys more life than abortion."

My mom is back from the nursing home and is receiving Gleevec as chemotherapy.  She also just got back from a trip to Santa Barbara with my two sisters and my cousin.  She's often had high blood pressure,  but it's been lower than usual. Her systolic is 150, but her diastolic is in the 40s.  She'll be seeing her doctor Thursday.

National Review Online published an editorial entitled Mandatory Abortion Coverage? which discussed, among other things, the limitations on the ability of contraception to reduce abortions.  Among the points made were that among low-income co-habiting teens, the failure rate for birth control pills was 48.4% and 71.7% for condoms.  The high failure rate may be in part due to the low educational level of many people in this income bracket, but another point made was that if one is only 3 hours late with progestin-only pills emergency contraception is advised for unprotected intercourse.  In addition, out of 23 studies not one showed that the availability of emergency contraception did anything to reduce the number of abortions.

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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 unwelcome personal developments

In an earlier post on my blog I described how my dad succumbed to a neurological disorder called multiple system atrophy. Now comes news that my mom has had a recurrence of angiosarcoma, a type of cancer that arises in blood and lymph vessels.  They're going to do a scan to see if the recurrence is localized or not, but they described it as a "glimmer of hope".  It comes on top of my having to take time off from work after being diagnosed with shingles, and the restaurant where I've been working being re-located while I was still on sick leave.  I got Mom a Blackmore's Night CD for Christmas because she always listens to a Celtic music program.  The last Christmas present I gave Dad was a reaching device to help pick up objects without having to bend over.  I'd actually gotten that for both of them, but Dad made more use of it in his final months before going to the nursing home.

An update, December 15:

They did the scan and did not find metastases in any vital organs, just in the skin.  They're going to remove the skin and replace it with a graft on Jan. 4.

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

an update, plus some things a few years ago

No luck in going to the vigil tomorrow at the hotel.  The other driver had agreed to work, but didn't realize his school project was due Wednesday, not Friday, so he had to back out this morning.

They’re thinking of reestablishing a booth at the San Diego County fair in the summer.  This is something that pro-life did many years ago which I always looked forward to, and I always hated it when work kept me from going.  I embarked on a walking program beginning in the spring of 2006 so I would be able to do that kind of stuff again.   It consisted of driving around to a number of supermarkets and drugstores and walking the circumference of those stores.   I would stop at one pair of stores, walk the circumference of them, then drive to another set of stores, and do the same.  I got up to around 10 or 12 such stores before making the jump to walking the mall at Parkway Plaza in the fall and winter of 2008 and 2009.  I was on cloud nine when I got to this point, but events would soon bring a big damper on this. 

My dad often suffered falls, which they thought was benign positional vertigo.  In February 2009 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  They gave him some medicines and assigned a couple of physical therapists to help him try to walk better, but he continued to fall.  In March 2009 they told us to take him to the hospital, which we did.  He never came home.  He was diagnosed with multiple system atrophy, which is a very severe form of Parkinson’s disease that doesn’t respond to the medication Parkinson’s normally responds to.  He was shuttled back and forth between the hospital and the nursing home about every two weeks.  The chairs at the nursing home were quite uncomfortable for both me and my mom when we visited Dad.  I tried to hide it as best I could, but he sensed something was off.  My dad died on May 3 of that year, after he died I learned I had an old compression fracture of one of the vertebrae.





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