Dr. Thomas Kipps and his team at the Leukemia Center at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have been at the forefront of Leukemia research for a long time. There are many things discovered there that have brought great benefit to CLL sufferers just like me, including the correlation of a less-favorable prognosis requiring…

I read an ABC news article on-line last night, from 2008 . . . well before Obamacare and the IPAB board was a factor looming in our lives. The article set forth the plight of an Oregon woman, the late Barbara Wagner, and her fight against lung cancer. Here is a link to the article,…

Captain James Cook was a British Royal Navy Captain, navigator, explorer, cartographer, and world traveler. Reading his journals is fascinating, with many, many mundane entries about longitude, latitude, depth soundings, and wind and weather, interspersed with glimpses of terror, mayhem, and death at sea, or the same on the shores of some distant island at…

So many gave so much. So many simply did their duty when called on. So many showed the determination to do their duty in the face of their worst fear, which is true courage. I am thankful for them all. I honor their memory. (Sergeant) Alvin C. York, a real person, born and raised in…

I was tired of my iPhone 3GS. I think it had also grown tired of me. It was time for me to upgrade. Detesting the fact that Apple forced me to use iTunes to do anything with my iPhone, and despising the way iTunes kept popping up on my PC, demanding that I use it,…

Debbie and I made our trip to BATCC for my annual checkup last weekend. We stopped in Baton Rouge and spent the night with our life-long friends, George and Myra, enjoyed a wonderful evening of conversation, good food, music, met some new musician friends, and had a special treat when George and Myra’s son, Casey,…

It looks like Obamacare is on the way to a dismantling by HHS directive, Congressional limitation, State refusal to participate in exchanges and Medicaid expansions, and will likely suffer a lingering death, or most likely, dis-corporate itself after an apparent suicide. What will replace it will likely be worse, not better. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius…

Not to be alarmist, or to worry myself unnecessarily, but for the first time since my first round of chemotherapy at BATCC in August 2009, my white blood cell count is slightly out of bounds on the high side. There’s many things that could cause this, none of them related to CLL. They are running…

Disgraced former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer gets a talk show. Disgraced former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford wins the GOP nomination to run for the Senate. Disgraced former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner has almost five million dollars in his political campaign chest to make a run for the New York Mayor’s office. Hmmmm!…

In the recent election, we seemed to have been overtaken in an outbreak of nastiness in Presidential politics, and towards the Presidential candidates in general. Depending on our party affiliation and the candidate we support, or if the President has our favor or disfavor, we either go too far, or we criticize others for doing…