Saturday, December 23, 2006

FW: Jessie Foster -- Articles from newspapers yesterday

In addition to praying for Robert Schindler for recovery, we also need to continue to remember those who are missing, and not with their loved ones for this Season.

Please keep praying for all of them.

God bless!

-----Original Message-----
From:
Glendene Grant [glendene@telus.net]
Sent
:
Friday, December 22, 2006 5:01 PM

There were 2 articles in the newspapers yesterday.

1) Kamloops, BC: http://www.kamloopsnews.ca//news.html (scroll down a bit to see our story)

Plus the local radio did an interview and it was on the 3 stations they have in town here.

Thank you everyone for your wonderful, strong, long-lasting support.

Please remember we still need to continue our fundraising...we need a bigger reward fund and we NEED to keep the search going (keeping our PI working, going to where we have to go in our search for Jessie. All of this is so very important, since we do not have the support of the Nevada / Las Vegas authorities that we so desperately need. So it is up to us, you...me...everyone to keep this investigation going strong. Thank you to everyone, God Bless you all and have a Merry Christmas and all the best in the New Year.

Love

Glendene and family

Jessica Foster in Trust

CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce)

Transit #: 00050 / Account #: 98-27412

Every little bit helps and is so appreciated, more than anyone can imagine.

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Friday, December 22, 2006

Fwd: From Wesley: Terri Schiavo's Father is Seriously Ill

My prayers and thoughts are with this family during this difficult time.

God bless!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: nancyvalko

Terri Schiavo's Father is Seriously Ill

Robert Schindler, Terri Schiavo's father, has had a stroke and is in a hospital intensive care unit. He is conscious. At present, the doctors are trying to stabilize his condition. Once that is done, he will be transferred to a rehabilitation center. His family, always a class act, is at his side and are hopeful for Bob's full recovery.

It's been a very tough couple of years for the Schindler family. Regardless of where one stands on the Terri Schiavo case, the Schindlers--Bob, Mary, Bobby, and Suzanne Vitadamo--deserve our best wishes and, for those of a mind, prayers, toward Bob's complete recovery and the family's well being in this difficult time.

Cards can be sent to:

Robert Schindler, c/o
The Terri Schiavo Foundation
5562 Central Ave. # 2
St. Petersburg. FL
33707

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Thursday, December 21, 2006

Adoption and Reunion

I have an adult daughter in reunion with her birthparents, and another adult daughter waiting for a response for over three years now. That is part of the reason I am putting these articles here.

It is very important for adoptees to be able to have access to their medical history on both sides of their birth family. We share a lot, an entire lifetime, but MY health has little to do with their histories! Even if there is never any reunion, having access to their origins and updated medical history is very important. Just being able to know the 'why' from those who made the decision eases a lot of big gaps/holes in people's lives.

Many adults do genealogy searches, for personal reasons, or for their church work. Ancestry.com and other sites are online because of this fascination with our roots. Adoptees are no different. But again, MY family history is not entirely theirs. They were 'grafted in', just as Scripture says WE are as Christians...their history with us begins with the adoption, not with their birth. There is a whole part of their history missing...namely, how they came to be, where they came from.

The women interviewed in these articles (and the sidebars) speak to another side of the Adoption Triad. Those left wondering if they made the right decision, if their child is ok, if the 'children' are angry at the persons who made such an important decision so long ago, etc. It is important that they be able to know, also.

As an adoptive mother, I was also nosy. I wondered about both Karen and Liz, Roger and unnamed bfather for many years. I always hoped that my daughters would want to search so that I could meet the women who gave my daughters life, and thank them.

We have met one now, and we continue to pray for the opportunity to someday meet the other set of bparents. For those who know nothing of the Adoption Triad, of the longing that both (perhaps all three) sides experience, these articles may be an eye-opener. For those of us living as members of the Triad... they speak to deep needs.

God bless!!

Day 1: Tuesday
Decades later, women forced to give up their "illegitimate children" for adoption still feel the pain.
Day 2: Wednesday
Women recall the fear and shame of being sent away to give birth and return "as if it never happened."
Day 3: Today
Reunions put birth mothers and the children they gave away on an emotional roller coaster.


Karen and Roger, thank you! Liz, I hope to meet you (and D or R) someday, and also to say thank you! God bless all four of you!


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FW: a huge favor (from Maggie Gallagher)

This came in email today from Maggie Gallagher. Passing it on for those interested.

God bless!



---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: FW: a huge favor
From: "Maggie Gallagher" <maggieiav@aol.com>
Date: Fri, December 15, 2006 11:05 am

I received the following note from Glenn Stanton at
Focus on the Family, I'm forwarding it, in case you
want to join the debate at Time magazine on
whether or not there is ANY scientific evidence that
children do best raised by their own married mother
and father. My own response is below the message
from Glenn.
Maggie

**************************
All:

Dr. Dobson wrote a piece in this week's Time
magazine on Mary Cheney and Heather Poe.

Time is also publishing a rebuttal from Cheryl Jacques'
(ex-HRC leader) signficant other, Jennifer Chrisler. It
will be in Monday's edition.

She says that Dr. Dobson is flat out lying by saying
that 30 years of research indicates that children do
best when raised by a mom and dad.

What we are asking is for folks like you to consider
weighing in by writing a letter to the editor of Time.
We are seeking key luminaries like you to do this by
simply submitting a short LTE in reponse to
Chrisler.

The two articles are....

Two Mommies Is One Too Many by James
Dobson,
PhD

Two Mommies or Two Daddies Will Do Fine, Thank
You
by Jennifer Chrisler

You can submit a letter to Time at:

Time Magazine

E-mail: letters@time.com


***************************

The Editors of Time:


Jennifer Chrisler accuses Dr. James Dobson of
simply "lying" when he argues scientific evidence
shows "children do best" when "raised by their
married mother and father." Here is how Child Trends
summed up the research on family structure in
2002:

“Research clearly demonstrates that family
structure matters for children . . . the family
structure that helps children the most is a family
headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict
marriage."

The Child Trends brief did not look directly at children
raised by gay parents, which is the source of the
disagreement here. Gay parenting studies show good
results, but few if any are based on the large,
nationally representative samples used to analyze
other family structures. Without probability sampling,
we cannot say with any scientific certainty how the
typical child raised from birth by a same-sex couple
fares.

But the scientific debate aside, here's the larger
point:

the 'nuclear family' is an expression for the
idea that the man and woman who make a baby
should love and care for one another, and their baby
too.

Jennifer Chrisler does no service to her cause in
belittling this idea. Her vitriol affirms the worst fears
of many Americans: gay marriage is not about helping
a small number of families who don't fit the norm: it's
about destroying the norm itself.

Maggie Gallagher, President

Institute for Marriage and Public Policy


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
email: maggieiav@aol.com
web: http://www.marriagedebate.com

Institute for Marriage and Public Policy | PO Box 1231 | Manassas | VA | 20108

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Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Project Jason has put Jessie's Christmas Story on their website

Blonde blogger had suggested that we get Jessie Foster’s family in touch with Project Jason recently. However, we learned that there is already a photo of Jessie on Project Jason, and that Jessie’s family already has been in touch.

 

Tonight, this email came from Jessie’s mother, Glendene. Please pray for this family, and for the others who are missing for any reason during this Christmas Season.

 

God bless!

 

-----Original Message-----
 

Hi Everyone, here we are with Christmas in just a few days and still no Jessie.  We will never give up our search, until we find Jessie and bring her home safe.

Please check out the website with Jessie's story on it.  They are doing a Home for the Holidays project for the www.projectjason.org missing person website. 

We hope you have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. 

 

Love Glendene, Jim, Crystal, Katie & Jennee and of course, Jessie too.

 

 

Monday, December 18, 2006

STLtoday article: Hospice and beyond from WICatholic1@gmail.com

Another reason why 'living wills' may not always be the best idea...NO one knows when life will end.

God bless!

This STLtoday.com article -- "Hospice and beyond"-- has been sent (by STLtoday)

Hospice and beyond

By Sandra G. Boodman

THE WASHINGTON POST

link to the story.



Here is the story.


For many people, the word "hospice" conjures up the mythical Hotel

California in the hit song of the same name: "You can check out any time

you like, but you can never leave."


But as the experience of humorist Art Buchwald demonstrates, entering a

hospice doesn't invariably mean leaving in a hearse.


When Buchwald refused dialysis for his failing kidneys and checked into the

Washington Home hospice in February 2006, his doctor told him he would

probably live only a few weeks. Yet Buchwald left the hospice five months

later — still very much alive. He spent the summer seeing family and

friends at his summer home on Martha's Vineyard, resumed his column,

celebrated his 81st birthday and wrote a book called "Too Soon to Say

Goodbye."


Although the circumstances of his case are unusual, his departure from

hospice is not.


Every year an estimated 13 percent of the approximately 900,000 Americans

who enter outpatient and inpatient hospice programs around the country are

discharged alive, experts say.


Although predicting how long seriously ill people have to live is

inherently uncertain, some hospice experts say that a dearth of reliable

predictive information can wreak emotional havoc.


Like Buchwald, many discharged hospice patients have exceeded their

doctors' predictions that they were likely to live less than six months, a

requirement for participation in federally funded hospice programs. (Those

who outlive the initial six months can be extended for another six months

with a physician's certification that they are likely to die in the next

half-year; if they outlive that, they are usually discharged as "extended

prognosis" cases.)


Unlike hospitals, whose purpose is typically aggressive treatment using the

latest technology, hospices emphasize pain control and comfort, and they

require that patients forgo therapies to extend life, such as chemotherapy

and dialysis.


Patients are free to leave hospice programs at any time. Some do so to seek

more aggressive treatment, others because they don't like the program or

staff, or to move out of the area. But outliving the initial six-month

projection is becoming more common as elderly patients with chronic,

noncancerous ailments such as congestive heart failure, dementia or lung

disease are increasingly enrolling in hospices.


"It happens all the time," says geriatrician Joanne Lynn, one of the

nation's best-known experts in palliative care and a senior scientist at

the Rand Corp. "The idea is as you get older, you're skating on thin ice —

and no one can tell you how thin it is or when it will crack."


After hospice ...


What happens to many people after they leave hospice is not well known,

experts say, but all agree that Buchwald's experience is scarcely typical.


"It's pretty rare for someone to go on vacation and write a book," says

Christine Turner, clinical services manager for hospice services at the

Washington Home, where the median length of stay in the 13-bed hospice unit

is 16 days.


"Very often, discharged patients and their caregivers still have a chronic,

debilitating disease to deal with," Turner adds. "There are many people who

live another six months or a year, and somebody still has to feed them or

change their diaper."


In his five months in residence, Buchwald was extraordinarily open about

entering a hospice, where he was visited by numerous friends, many of them

famous. He gave interviews in which he joked about having a terminal

illness and openly discussed the prospect of his death.


Buchwald is an anomaly for medical reasons as well. Patients with kidney

failure who don't undergo dialysis rarely last longer than a few weeks.

Some die within hours. Shortly before he checked into the hospice, doctors

had amputated Buchwald's right leg to prevent gangrene, which is often a

complication of long-standing diabetes or high blood pressure.


"His case is unusual — but someone has to win the lottery," says Nicholas

Christakis, an internist and sociologist at Harvard Medical School who has

written extensively about the impact on patients of doctors' end-of-life

prognoses.


"His kidneys were obviously in better shape" than anyone realized,

Christakis said.


How long?


To Christakis, Buchwald's experience illuminates one of medicine's more

glaring unmet needs — an accurate answer to the question asked by many

patients and their families that doctors give reluctantly, if at all: How

long do I have?


Christakis says the subject is neither taught in medical school nor

discussed in textbooks and is rarely studied by researchers.


"Right now they predict by the seat of their pants," he says, because some

physicians fear causing patients greater pain or because they are

personally uncomfortable with the sense of failure a dying patient can

inspire.


"The answer matters horribly," adds Christakis, author of a 1999 book on

the subject, "Death Foretold." He also has published several studies about

prognosis, among them a report in the British Medical Journal in 2000. That

study, which involved 468 terminally ill patients and their physicians,

found that only 20 percent of prognostic estimates were even approximately

accurate while 63 percent were overly optimistic: Patients were told they

had weeks or months to live, but the median length of survival was 24 days.

Seven percent of patients died just hours after arriving at a hospice.


Without reasonably accurate prognostic information, Christakis says,

patients are caught short — unable to put their affairs in order, say

goodbye to loved ones or live their final days as they would wish. Many, he

says, make "terrible decisions" on the basis of erroneous predictions,

undergoing painful treatments such as last-ditch chemotherapy that cause

great suffering for little or no benefit.


Too often, Christakis says, patients "die deaths they deplore in locations

they despise."


"If you have a month to live rather than a year left, you'll make a

different choice," Christakis says. "That's why this is so important.


When out-of-town family members ask him whether they should visit a

terminally ill relative, Christakis says, "I always say 'Yes.' Better a

week too early than a week too late."


His interest in the subject is rooted in painful personal experience. When

he was 6 and living in Washington, Christakis said, his mother, 28, was

diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin's disease and told she had three weeks to

live. She died 19 years later.


"I grew up as a boy both detesting and craving diagnostic precision,"

recalls Christakis, who became an oncologist and later a specialist in

palliative medicine.


Asking the right questions


Lynn, president of Americans for Better Care of the Dying, a nonprofit

group based in Alexandria, Va., says the change in the kind of patients

hospices attract also accounts for the growing number of extended-prognosis

discharges.


When the hospice movement was launched in the early 1980s, she notes, most

patients were younger — in their 50s and 60s — and were suffering from

advanced cancer, which is usually more swiftly and predictably lethal.


Today, she notes, many patients are elderly and beset by more chronic

life-ending conditions, such as dementia or heart failure; the date of such

a death is harder to predict accurately.


Patients who want prognostic information, she says, might do better to

reframe the "How long do I have?" question.


"We need to ask our doctors — and our doctors need to answer — questions

like, 'What's the shortest and longest time you think I have?'"?" she says.

The other question patients might want to ask, she says, is, "How is it

likely to happen? Will I have a lot of warning or is it likely to sneak up

on me?"


Dr. Cameron Muir, vice president of medical services at Capital Hospice,

which operates a network of programs in the Washington area, observes that

sometimes patients who have been declining perk up and begin to gain weight

when they enter hospice, buying them another year of life or more.


Sometimes, says Washington Home's Turner, discharged patients inspire mixed

emotions.


"Some people are grateful," she says. "They'll say, 'Oh, great, now we've

got more time to spend with Mom.' Others are exhausted and have gotten

themselves prepared. They'll say, 'What do you mean she's not dying?'"?"


Buchwald alluded to his own psychological adjustment in a column published

Sept. 23.


"There was a tiny part of me that thought I wouldn't die. I ignored that

voice and thought I would soon be gone," he wrote.



"I'm practicing now not being dead."

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NYT: CPR works better than previously thought

Emphasis below is mine. Nancy Valko, RN also has a comment with the article that gives my own thinking.

God bless!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nancy Valko

Comment: Many people are encouraged to refuse CPR by way of "living wills"
and the usual stat given is that CPR fails about 70% of the time. But note
the new stats on out of hospital resuscitations: "

"The researchers defined survival as surviving at least through hospital
discharge," the heart association said. "They found that from 2002 through
2004, survival rate after cardiac arrest averaged 33 percent when patients
were resuscitated out of the hospital using 2000 guidelines.
"Survival improved to an average 46 percent for the group that received
resuscitation with the new 2005 protocol."

    Just a few weeks ago, a 50 year old friend went into cardiac arrest at a
lecture. His girlfriend, an ICU nurse, started CPR and called for a portable
defibrillator. Some doctors also stopped to help. The man was shocked 10
times and transported to a nearby hospital. He was found to have a 100%
blockage in one artery and was treated. He not only survived but had NO
heart or brain damage. A test showed that he didn't even need an internal
defibrillator.

   My point is that sometimes a Do Not Resuscitate order is appropriate but
people should consider these facts before automatically rejecting CPR.

Nancy V.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/health/12cpr.html

New Guidelines Alter Cardiac Arrest Response


            By REUTERS
Published: December 12, 2006

DALLAS, Dec. 11 - More CPR, less shock. That was the new directive issued by
the American Heart Association on Monday for emergency workers helping
victims of cardiac arrest.

Tests show that giving a little cardiopulmonary resuscitation before
repeatedly using a defibrillator can help more patients survive a crisis in
which their heart stops pumping blood effectively.

CPR, which involves manual compressions of the chest, is the standard first
aid response to someone suffering cardiac arrest.
Previous guidelines stressed the use of a defibrillator, normally
administered by emergency medical personnel after their arrival at the
scene.

However, defibrillators meant for use by laypeople are also being installed
in airports, gyms and other public areas.

"The new way of thinking is that we should administer shocks only at key
times in order to provide more CPR during the resuscitation," said Dr.
Thomas Rea, who led a study that was published in the journal Circulation
and was used as the basis for the new guidelines.

"The idea is that the CPR prepares the heart to better accept the shock and
have the shock work," Dr. Rea, an associate professor of medicine at
Harborview Medical Center at the University of Washington in Seattle, said
in a statement.

The old guidelines called for repeated shocks and a pulse check before
administering CPR.

The new method employs a single shock followed by two minutes of CPR, the
heart association said.

For most laypeople who have no access to a defibrillator, the standard
response remains the same.

"In most circumstances, the layperson can recognize that there is an
emergency, call 911 and administer CPR while they wait for the emergency
responders," Dr. Rea said.

The new approach was tested in King County, Wash., by emergency medical
technicians, who started using the procedure on Jan. 1, 2005.

"The researchers defined survival as surviving at least through hospital
discharge," the heart association said. "They found that from 2002 through
2004, survival rate after cardiac arrest averaged 33 percent when patients
were resuscitated out of the hospital using 2000 guidelines.

"Survival improved to an average 46 percent for the group that received
resuscitation with the new 2005 protocol."

"Advent: Waiting on Christ"

One of my young internet friends has written this article. I would like to share it with you, and hope that you, too, are remembering to prepare in more ways for the occasion to remember His Birth than just the hustle and bustle that goes with getting ready for Christmas.

After all, He is why we celebrate that holiday----a HOLY DAY.

God bless!

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Personal message:
I thought you might like to read this article titled "Advent: Waiting on Christ" from Crosswalk.com
To see the article, please click on the URL listed below

http://www.crosswalk.com/faith /1457962.html
============================================================
Crosswalk.com   http://www.crosswalk.com/

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Breaking News >> One Dead Person Found Dead in Second Snow Cave, Mount Hood Sheriff's Office Says

They have not identified which of three missing men it is, but the family members have been notified. He was found in a second snow cave, after having found an empty cave with ice axes and sleeping gear earlier.

They do not know where the other two are as yet, and are coming down the mountain soon.

More details can be found at Fox News website.

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