Odd coincidences

I popped into my local Chevron the other night for some late night snacks and ran into two of my favorite neighborhood people, Danny and Rachael.

I met Rachael walking dogs in the neighborhood.  She's a super cute, feisty, smart, law student (I think she's still a student) at Emory and her boyfriend Danny is just as nice and intelligent, although not nearly as cute.

I really like bumping into those two.  They're that couple that makes you think of saying something like, 

"Danny, you should keep this one."  

We were catching up in the junk food aisle when Danny mentioned that he was from Pittsburgh to which I replied that I had a very special place in my heart for Pittsburgh and in particular, UPMC and MINC, which was then run by Dr. Amin Kassam, the fella that got rid of that ol' tumor thing for me.

Turns out Danny worked in the lab at UPMC and was an assistant of Dr. Kassam's.

I hugged him on the spot, which I'm pretty sure scared him all to hell and back, but didn't stop me at all.

We had a nice chat about Dr. K and Danny agreed that along with being a brilliant, hard working guy, Dr. K was one of the nicest doctors he had the pleasure of working with while at the medical center.

All of this struck me as very timely and odd, given that I had finished typing an email to a local guy who was just diagnosed with a fairly rare pituitary tumor and had asked for a little advice.

Life is weird like that.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chordoma

Editors Note:

I was just re-reading the Wikipedia info on clival chordoma to see what has been updated.

Down at the bottom you can see a handful of  celebrities who have also had a clival chordoma.

I was immediately attracted to the Cary Tennis, a writer for Salon.com who announce in late 2009 that he had a clival chordoma.

My immediate instincts were to write to him a few words of encouragement - not that I'm anything special but that this is a pretty rare tumor.

Then I read this by Tennis:

Tennis writes of America: 

"Nothing has changed structurally; we are still a hateful, war-waging culture that denigrates women, celebrates killing, despoils the planet, plunders the resources of less powerful people, keeps a permanent underclass in virtual economic slavery and wages imperialist wars abroad. We're still the same country we were when I was growing up in the 1960s.".

And I just kinda thought, nah.  Why bother.

To be honest, if this is what he honestly thinks of his country, his world, then just lie down and don't get treatment for that tumor in your head.

Shouldn't have surprised me that a writer for Salon has a dim view of America.