Month: April 2006

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What would the world be like if everyone acted like Kevin Gosling?

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Giving the gift of life — to a total stranger
LISA PRIEST Globe & Mail

Kevin Gosling was sent to three psychiatrists to see whether he had a death wish, was seeking atonement for a past sin or was just plain crazy when he offered to do something no other Canadian had ever done: donate part of his liver to a stranger.

The 46-year-old man’s wish was answered last year when he underwent a six-hour operation at Toronto General Hospital to have two sections of the left part of his liver dissected and transplanted into a child.
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Maybe there is hope for mankind

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Ivy League next chapter for book-loving native girl
LISA FITTERMAN
Special to The Globe and Mail

MONTREAL — When she was 13, Skawenniio Barnes just wanted a quiet place to read after school on the Kahnawake Reserve outside of Montreal. So the Mohawk teenager — whose first name means “beautiful word” — fought to build a library.

Come September, she will be toting her books in the hallowed halls of one of North America’s most prestigious Ivy League schools. Her steely determination so impressed Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth that all four universities offered her full scholarships.
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Pope John Paul II

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An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.
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Progress Report

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This is for my family and friends who ask about me and for all of the men who will go through this is future. Here is some information about the after effects of brachytherapy.

It’s been 14 days exactly since I had the surgery, if that is the right term. It took less than an hour to implant 88 iodine 125 seeds. Because of anaethesia it was painless and I was back on my feet almost immediately. The only complaint (if I’m allowed one because I must remember we are fighting cancer) is waking frequently at night needing to pee but having a weak stream. This comes from the swelling of the prostate squeezing the urethra. However it gets better every day and should be gone in another two weeks. And brachytherapy is so much easier than external beam radiation or surgery. However the cancer must be early stage or brachytherapy is not an option.

See also: MyProstateCancer.ca

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The Price of Children

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The government recently calculated the cost of raising a child from birth to 18 and came up with $160,140 for a middle income family. That doesn’t include college tuition.

But $160,140 isn’t so bad if you break it down. It translates into: $8,896.66 a year, $741.38 a month, $171.08 a week, $24.24 a day or just over a dollar an hour.

What do you get for your $160,140?
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John Curtis Memorial

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John Curtis Memorial
Slideshow
Photos from the wake
Memorial Pamphlet

A train went through a burial gate,
A bird broke forth and sang,
And trilled, and quivered, and shook his throat
Till all the churchyard rang;

And then adjusted his little notes,
And bowed and sang again.
Doubtless, he thought it meet of him
To say good-by to men.
Emily Dickinson

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
William Wordsworth