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Category Archives: Health
Roger Ebert dies at age 70
Prom comes to dying teen
Fourteen-year-old Katelyn Norman doesn’t have much time left. Doctors say osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, will soon take the Tennessee teen’s life. But it hasn’t stolen all her chances to experience the joys of being young — including the prom. Katelyn hoped she’d be well enough to attend a personalized prom at her school Tuesday night, but that afternoon she had trouble breathing and had to be hospitalized. Her friends and family rallied, bringing the event to her hospital room, where her date presented her with a corsage and a “Prom Queen” sash. Katelyn insisted that the prom at school proceed without her: “She contacted me and said prom must go on — that’s her, and you can’t help but feed off that energy, that life,” said the organizer. [Source]
Women are dying sooner – with all the drama, lies and fakeness, no wonder!
A new study offers more compelling evidence that life expectancy for some U.S. women is actually falling, a disturbing trend that experts can’t explain.
The latest research found that women age 75 and younger are dying at higher rates than previous years in nearly half of the nation’s counties — many of them rural and in the South and West. Curiously, for men, life expectancy has held steady or improved in nearly all counties.
The study is the latest to spot this pattern, especially among disadvantaged white women. Some leading theories blame higher smoking rates, obesity and less education, but several experts said they simply don’t know why.
Women have long outlived men, and the latest numbers show the average life span for a baby girl born today is 81, and for a baby boy, it’s 76. But the gap has been narrowing and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown women’s longevity is not growing at the same pace as men’s.
The phenomenon of some women losing ground appears to have begun in the late 1980s, though studies have begun to spotlight it only in the last few years.
Trying to figure out why is “the hot topic right now, trying to understand what’s going on,” said Jennifer Karas Montez, a Harvard School of Public Health sociologist who has been focused on the life expectancy decline but had no role in the new study.
Researchers also don’t know exactly how many women are affected. Montez says a good estimate is roughly 12 percent.
RIP Stan Musial
One night after his longtime friend and teammate Red Schoendienst was honored on his upcoming 90th birthday, fellow Cardinals Hall of Famer Stan Musial died quietly at age 92 at 5:45 p.m. Saturday at his St. Louis County home under hospice care.
Musial’s family members who did not live here had gathered in the last day when Musial’s health had deteriorated. A family spokesman made the announcement.
Musial, who turned 92 in November, has been in declining health for the last several years, including being afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. Lillian Musial, his wife of more than 70 years, had died last May 4.
Considered the greatest Cardinal of them all, Musial also likely was the most popular Cardinal of them all, continuing to make his home in St. Louis after his retirement in 1963.
Playing his entire 22-season career with the Cardinals, Musial is the franchise leader in virtually every category, including hits at 3,630, splitting them evenly at 1,815 at home and 1,815 on the road.
Selected to play in a record-tying 24 All-Star Games, Musial won seven National League batting titles.
Signed to a professional contract by the St. Louis Cardinals as a pitcher 1938, Musial was converted into an outfielder, where he made his major league debut in 1941.
At the time of his retirement, Musial held or shared 17 major league records, 29 National League records, and nine All-Star Game records. In addition to overseeing businesses such as Stan Musial and Biggie’s restaurant, Musial served as the Cardinals’ general manager in 1967 and then quit after his team won both the National League title and World Series that year.
RIP Earl Weaver
Irascible, chain-smoking, umpire-baiting longtime Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver penned his own epitaph.
“On my tombstone just write, ‘The sorest loser that ever lived,’” he once said.
Weaver, 82, a member of baseball’s Hall of Fame and the winningest manager in the franchise’s history, died late Friday while on a baseball-themed cruise, said Monica Barlow, a team spokeswoman.
The cause apparently was a heart attack, the team said on its website.
Weaver, who piloted the Orioles from 1968 to 1982 and 1985-86, led the team to the 1970 World Series championship, four American League pennants and six American League East Division titles.
His teams won 1,480 games and lost 1,060, and his winning percentage (.583) ranks ninth all-time and fifth among managers in the modern era who managed 10 years or more.
Five times, Baltimore won at least 100 games for Weaver, who was 5 feet 7 but stood mythically tall to his players.
“Having Earl gives us a four-game lead on everybody,” pitcher Sammy Stewart once said.
The Orioles failed to post a winning record under Weaver only once, in 1986. His career was defined by an affinity for the three-run home run and a long-running, public feud with superstar pitcher Jim Palmer that both men jokingly played to whenever they were together.
Nicknamed “the Earl of Baltimore,” Weaver was always a fan favorite. He repeatedly returned to Baltimore to take part in a series of statue unveilings at Oriole Park, including one dedicated to him in June.
The People we lost in 2012
I lost a friend named John Gilson. He was a Navy vet, good pool player and cool person to talk to. He always gave me good advice. John was as real as they came. He left us way too soon.
Michael Carr was a close family friend. He was a very even-tempered person who never had anything bad to say about anyone. One bad choice ended his life.
We lost Michael Clarke Duncan.
We lost Andy Griffith.
We lost Gen. Borman Schwarzkopf
We lost Neil Armstrong.
We lost Dick Clark.
Nice blog #21 – Kosair Children’s Hospital
More info please click here.
Hector Camacho dies at age 50
Not a fan, but what a shock. I loved watching him get beaten to a pulp by Julius Caesar Chavez. Boxing did lose one of it’s biggest names of all-time today.
His death was reported by Dr. Ernesto Torres, the director of the Centro Médico trauma center in Puerto Rico, who said Camacho had a heart attack and died a short time later after being taken off life support. He was declared brain dead on Thursday.
The police said that Camacho was shot in the left side of the face on Tuesday night as he sat in a black Ford Mustang with a friend, The Associated Press reported. The bullet fractured his vertebrae and was lodged in his shoulder when he was taken to the Puerto Rico Medical Center. The friend, Adrian Mojica Moreno, was also killed.
The police said that two men fled the scene in a sport utility vehicle but that no arrests had been made. They said that nine bags of cocaine were found in Moreno’s pockets and that a 10th was found open in the car.
Fighting in bouts sanctioned by professional boxing’s myriad organizing bodies, Camacho, who was widely known as Macho Camacho, won titles as a super featherweight (maximum 130 pounds), a lightweight (135 pounds) and a junior welterweight (140 pounds). In his last title bout, at age 35 in 1997, he fought at 147 pounds and lost to the welterweight champion Oscar De La Hoya.
Terrifically agile and fast afoot, Camacho had a sackful of canny tricks gleaned from his teenage years as a street fighter; he was known occasionally to spin his opponents 180 degrees and reach around to punch them from behind. Rather than a slugger, he was a precise, impossibly rapid-fire puncher and deft counterpuncher who early on drew the admiration of the boxer who was then the avatar of hand speed, Sugar Ray Leonard.
“Not only quick, but accurate,” Leonard said in 1982 after watching Camacho, then a super featherweight, dispatch Johnny Sato in four rounds. He added: “I told him that people are always asking who’s going to take my place. I told him he could.”
Todd Kelly – loser is now out of jail
LOUISVILLE, KY. (WDRB) — It’s a story of lies and betrayal — a well-known Louisville DJ turned into a con man, stealing thousands of dollars and faking a disease he never had.
Just months after he was released from prison, Todd Smith, once known as Todd Kelly, broke his silence exclusively to WDRB News.
Todd Smith is getting a second chance many of his victims will not. He was freed from prison just four months ago after serving four years behind bars at Fort Dix in New Jersey.
When asked what prison was like, he replied, “It was difficult because you’re around people you don’t know. Some are there for harsher crimes, some for less. You have to learn to adjust and I did…It was a learning experience, made me appreciate life and what I had before I went in.”
That included a job as the promotions director and DJ known as Todd Kelly at WDJX Radio. In 2001, he announced he was stricken with a deadly disease — ALS. Also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, it gradually robs its victims of the ability to move, and eventually to breathe.
He soon started the Todd Kelly Foundation to raise money for research. But suspicion grew when Smith showed no symptoms after several years. He eventually admitted he faked having the disease, and that the foundation was a scam. He pleaded guilty to stealing from people who thought they were donating money to help cure a killer disease.
“I guess it’s greed,” he says. “It’s just at that point thinking about myself, and that’s the hardest part because I care for others.”
He continues, “It just happened. It just sort of, it was there and it was easy. I can’t explain it. It wasn’t premeditated…It’s almost like when you’re told not to take a cookie out of the cookie jar and you take one and you like it so then you go back and take another and another and it just spiraled out of control.”
Smith used the donated money for vacations, alcohol, limos, meals at restaurants, and bills but wouldn’t discuss the details.
“Some of the money,” he says, “did go directly to ALS and some things went to cancer stuff, but it didn’t go where it should have went and should have gone to ALS, and I take responsibility for that. That was my fault, and it just was used for other things….It just went for myself basically. When you start doing it, you start paying for this, paying for that.”
Smith says a muscular disease that contributed to his father’s death is part of why he chose to fake ALS, a similar disease: “I think because part of it was because of my Dad. He had Guillain–Barré — it wasn’t the same thing, but along the same lines….That’s where I went wrong. I should have done it the right way and raised awareness for that.”
