The bride in this photo is my friend Kim Christine Bergman-Warriner standing beside her new husband, Cole Warriner, on their wedding day, August 13, 2005. She was a month short of her 28^th birthday. You cannot see it in the photo, but Cole wore a kilt that day purely to please Kim. She was keenly interested in her family’s Scottish ancestry and always ‘had a thing  for a man in a kilt'. 

        Monday August 17^th 2009 was the fourth anniversary of her death from Lymphoma.

Neither Kim nor Cole had any illusions about the duration of their marriage; everyone at the wedding knew Kim was dying even if nobody knew how very soon the end would come. Because Cole is a Canadian citizen and Kim could not wait for immigration red tape, the marriage was not legally binding, but was definitely valid spiritually.  She was able to leave her wheel chair long enough for the photos to be taken. Circumstances would force her to miss a lot of the big events of life, but she was determined not to miss having a wedding on top of everything else. Planning and preparing for her wedding kept up Kim’s strength and  spirits that final summer after receiving the diagnosis that was her death sentence in May. Once the excitement of the wedding was over and the guests had gone home, Kim went down fast.  She was admitted to the hospital 48 hours after making her wedding vows.  Cole and her family were with her when she slipped into coma on the afternoon of her death.  She was gone by six that evening.

Before I met her, Kim fought her first battle with Lymphoma when she was in her late teens. I’m unsure of the exact time table whether it came before or after Kim's battle, but Kim's older sister, Rhea, died  close to that time of a different form of cancer. Kim's family was deeply grateful, believing she'd dodged the bullet when her cancer went into remission.   No doubt her  reprieve and the knowledge of how  unexpectedly a  young person could fall ill and die gave Kim her particular love of life.

    Twenty-first century technology enabled me to “meet” Kim online in 2000, long before I met her in person. She wrote me an enthusiastic email to introduce herself after reading a story of mine online. It was my first and so far my only fan letter, but she sure knew how to endear herself to an aspiring author. She and I emailed and chatted through AIM regularly after that.  It was impossible not to appreciate Kim for herself as she was cheerful, smart, sweet and lots of fun.  And at the end, she faced her death with heartbreaking courage.   

                   In the summer of 2004, Kim received the terrible news that her Lymphoma was back and in a more aggressive and deadly form than before. As bad luck would have it, Kim had lost her job and with it, her health insurance shortly before.  I was not privy to all the details, but after months of worry and family fund raising and at grave financial cost to themselves,   Kim’s parents managed to get Kim into the Mayo Clinic for Stem Cell Therapy in December 2004.  Kim’s oncologist  judged this was the only chance Kim had to beat her cancer.  As I the lay person understand  the procedure, after a sufficient number of stem cells have been harvested from the patient  and placed in stasis, the patient then undergoes a short but highly toxic course of chemotherapy to kill their tumors (and quite a lot of healthy cells with them).  Then the stem cells are reintroduced to the patient’s body to repair the damage done, and hopefully, return the patient to health.  While life-saving in many cases, Stem Cell Therapy is painfully unpleasant for the patient and comes at a great cost, as the overwhelming majority  of patients are rendered sterile. Kim wanted very much to live, but this trade-off was a grief to her, as she’d also very much wanted children.  

            At first, it seemed to have worked. In the winter of 2005, Kim felt better, grew stronger and was able to return home, regrow her hair and start re-planning the life it looked like she had got back. But she never felt 100% normal and she  began going downhill again in late spring. She underwent a new round of tests and got the worst news; she had aggressive new tumors in places they hadn’t shown up before, including on her liver.  After the brain, the liver is perhaps the worst place to have a cancerous tumor.  Another effect of Stem Cell Therapy is that the patient’s bone marrow is like that of a young child for several months after the treatment, and Kim did not yet have the strength to undergo a course of adult chemotherapy potent enough to kill her new batch of tumors.  There was nothing more to be done.

            With all this turmoil going on about health care this summer, if I had thirty minutes with President Obama, I’d tell him something like this:

“Mr. President,

I’m a staunch supporter of yours. Your dedication to reforming health care is a big part of why I voted for you. I hope and believe you will get it passed, yet. I really want to believe in you, because the alternative is too depressing for words.  I urge you not to give up and not to give in one inch, and above all, don't wait.  We can’t afford to fail this time.  All the cancer patients like my friend Kim, and all their families left destitute and grieving can’t afford to wait. The overwhelming majority of Americans know we need this and are behind it. We’ve got your back and  we have to do this now. The bolder you are in passing a strong bill with the public option intact, the stronger my personal support for you will be. 

            “But I must tell you frankly this is not a time to be generous or bipartisan. This is the time to be bold,  forceful and Bad Ass. Take advantage of the  window of opportunity  you have to pass this essential part of your agenda.  The Republicans, for whom my opinion is at an all time low, want you to fail. They aren’t shy about saying so, either.  (They seem to be at their most appalling when they’re being truthful.)  If someone is trying to beat you up, for Heaven’s sake, DON’T hand them a baseball bat. We have the majority in Congress back and a strong Democratic president and while we have both and if we want to hang onto both, we’ve got to move on health care reform immediately before Republicans can derail it or poison the public well any more than they already have.  Don’t worry about bruised wittle Republican feelings.  They deserve no such consideration.

            “Harsh words, yes.  But my feelings are based on the following:

1.       After defeating Hillary Clinton’s health care program in 1994, the GOP made NO effort to introduce any kind of meaningful health care reform of their own  in the twelve years of their Congressional majority.  Bush might have vetoed it true, but if they’d made the sincere effort to come up with something that would work, Clinton might well have cooperated. They weren't even interested.

2.          The need for Health Care Reform didn’t disappear, but it sure wasn’t part of their agenda in the “Contract  With  On America.” Instead, Newt Gingrich cranked up the volume on screaming partisan bile with his “Sick, Pathetic Traitorous”   rhetoric against Democrats. With the effect that the country is now as divided as I’ve seen it in my lifetime.  Two parties simultaneously screaming at one another across the divide is a tremendous barrier to solving the problems we face. Many of which were made worse through Republican neglect.

3      After 9/11 I guess Republicans were too busy  wearing Rhinestone flag pins, sneering at France and Germany and petulantly asking “Why do you hate America?” while George Bush was lying to us all, and lying to the world in order to attack Iraq to pay any attention to the huge financial burden private health care was putting on American citizens.  And even worse, the financial burden for those with no insurance and the  fearful indecision  of wondering if their child’s emergency was grave enough to warrant going to the Emergency Room for care. Why should Congressional Republicans worry about us?  They got the best Health Care available! They had theirs, the rest of us could stop whining and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

4.   For all their “Support the Troops!” rhetoric, casualties came home from Iraq and Afghanistan to Walter Reed Hospital. And conditions like these: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/17/AR2007021701172.html  If  in the GOP’s eyes, even soldiers didn’t deserve state of the art care in a clean welll maintained  hospital  you can bet civilians didn’t and still don't.

5.       Stem Cell Therapy may not have saved Kim, but I still believe it is the most important medical advance of the 21^st century thus far.  At very least, America should be very much  in the research game.  So I was gratified by your support of it.THANK YOU!    Stem Cell Therapy bought Kim time she wouldn’t have had otherwise.  And it has the potential to save and improve so many lives, even if the actual cures aren’t available, yet.  I’m furious with GWB for many reasons. But one of the biggest was  his stifling of Stem Cell research on the basis of his own religious narrowness.  Some President for the 21^st century when his thinking would have been  right at home in a medieval monastery. I’m wondering if he’s spending his post presidential life knitting microscopic baby bonnets for blastocysts. Potential humans fared a lot better with Bush than actual ones  What, I beg you, is more life affirming about disposing of blastocysts left over from invitro ferilization rather  than making good scientific use of them in medical research to find cures we need?

6.    I suppose there’s a silver lining in the GOP’s utter inattention to Health Care Reform; Who would want health care devised by the  party that brought us Abu Ghraib and Gitmo?  A party still  full of people  ready to loudly and earnestly argue that “Waterboarding isn’t REALLY torture”?  Great  humanitarians  they are. Absolutely no shame and a severely impaired sense of irony, as well.

7.        Yet now they have the utter and absolute gall to compare health care to Hitler’s Death Camps?  To paraphrase the wonderful Rep Barney Frank, “On what planet do these people spend most of their time?

8.       My Grandmother made her end of life wishes very clear many years before her death. Thus, when she experienced a severe stroke that left her comatose at age 93 and dead three days later, my mother and uncle were not left with the awful indecision of  “is this really what Mother would have wanted?” questions that can plague families at those times. It was still  sad  for  everyone, but there was no doubt and no question about what she did and did not want to have done for her. I just don’t get the hysteria about the wisdom of planning ahead in a lucid, rational manner before an emergency arises.  We are all ultimately terminal on this bus--why not acknowledge the fact honestly?  Mr. President, why not point out you lost your own beloved grandmother less than a year ago after her prolonged illness. Your mother  had to fight with her insurance company for coverage from her hospital bed while fighting cancer as well,  and she died before she had the chance to meet  her grandddaughters. You're hardly the man to go around pulling the plug on sick and elderly people. Shame on Sarah Palin and anyone else who would insinuate that!

   9.  What infuriates me even more than the hysterical "death panel!"  lies about  end of life  planning and counseling are the stories about  insurance companies canceling existing policies  on specious grounds just when their policy holders have been handed some terrifying diagnosis.  After faithfully paying health premiums that would choke a moose for years in the mistaken belief their policies would tbe there to protect them if they ever fell ill, nobody  deserves to have the rug yanked out from under them so brutally: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/08/11/denial_of_care/ 

10.         Socialized medicine scares me much less than failing to reform the expensive, inefficient system we have now.  And where Insurance companies are more worried about having to lose a few dollars than a policy holder losing their life.  I’m not interested in having this country ruined because of hysteria over any form of socialism at all.  Privatized profit-based health care has failed us. Socialized health care appears to work well in other countries for far less cost to their citizens and economies.  Why wouldn't WE want that, too???  What good is advanced medical science and finding amazing new cures for chronic conditions if people can’t even afford  routine checkups and preventive medicine?

  11.     So while Republicans  have  a vested interest in seeing your plan and your presidency fail, the Rapture will occur before we get reasonable Health Care Reform from the Republican Party. They'll  come hysterically screaming out of the wood work to try to defeat anyone else’s health care  plan, but have already demonstrated their utter lack of interest and competence in putting anything workable together themselves if it will benefit Americans in lower tax brackets than their own. When Hillary Clinton was putting together her original health care plan in  1993, she went everywhere, talked to thousands of people and worked hard.  The Republicans have never done anything close to that.  But now we're supposed to believe they're the experts?   Wasn't it Dr. and ex-Senator Bill Frist who claimed the brain dead Terri Schiavo was lucid because her eyes appeared to track balloons moving in her hospital room? And here's my favorite part--he made this brilliant obsesrvation on the basis of a video tape without ever having been in the same room with her or having examined her or seeing any of her medical charts.  It would be funny if it were less contemptible.

12. While I believe all Americans deserve to attend a town hall meeting and have their honest concerns addressed and their honest questions answered, I also believe that while they’re there, they should show enough courtesy to not disrupt other people’s right to the same thing. Most of what I’ve seen from the GOP this summer has been lies and hysteria, and a bad behavior campaign to make sure nobody ELSE gets their questions answered.   People who are as gullible as goldfish are being incited by Faux News and Rush Limbaugh to destroy  something that will help them before they even get it and find out it's a damn site better than what they used  to have.     

  Shut the GOP out and  cut them off. They are not contributing anything of value, here. They deserve no consideration or  courtesy  and no bipartisanship when they are totally unwilling to show those qualities to anyone else. Let them take the consequences and feel some heat for their bad behavior. Let them feel the smart of defeat, but do not let a noisy minority hurt the  majority of Americans who spoke up loudly for change last November.  Since they can't win by reason, Republicans are trying to win by volume when they  actively encourage yahoos to go to meetingspurely to prevent anything constructive from  happening.  They can't be permitted to succeed.

   Kim wasn’t unique. Although it's too late to help her, I know she’d want other people in her situation to get a better deal than she got without their illness and death bringing financial devastation to their families. It has always seemed utterly wrong to me that families should have to risk losing everything else when trying to save a parent or child. Yet  it seems the "Pro-Life" GOP  would have it so before they'll be reasonable about medical care.

 Don’t be nice, Mr. President. Don’t be bipartisan or  give away the store.  

JUST PASS HEALTH CARE, WARTS AND ALL, NOW!