by Yanick Rice Lamb | Jun 24, 2014 | Articles, Websites |
Samantha Hawkins marked the seasons of 2010 from a hospital bed at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. She was admitted in the spring for 83 days, came out for two weeks in early summer, and returned for five and a half months spanning fall and winter. Finally, Hawkins went home for the holidays on Dec. 21. For her family, the homecoming was a Christmas miracle. At times, her relatives thought she might not make it, said her mother, Lula Hawkins. They held her hands, praying and shoring up each other through one complication after another from kidney disease, congestive heart failure, diabetes and a mysterious inflammatory ailment finally diagnosed as sarcoidosis. “That’s when things started going downhill,” said her older sister, Gwen Cooper. Hawkins has endured a 10-day coma, three mini-strokes, three bouts of pneumonia, plus surgery in August to implant a heart pump. Despite her list of ailments, part of what kept the 45-year-old stuck in the hospital was her lack of insurance. Once upon a time, Hawkins had medical coverage as a housekeeper at a hospital in Westchester County, New York. After she left that job three years ago, she took out a policy on her own, but then the insurance company dropped her. When Hawkins ended up at Montefiore, weeks turned into months as she lay in a hospital bed with no way to cover her stay there or her next level of care. In the meantime, the hospital absorbed her bill while trying to help her find a way to pay for nursing care at her mother’s apartment or for long-term care at a facility willing...
by Yanick Rice Lamb | Jun 24, 2014 | Notes From Nini |
A man I’m profiling for a story on caregiving just lost his mother an hour ago. Listening to his experiences and sensing his emotions over the last two weeks have reminded me of losing my mother on Easter. It’s been like reliving it all over again. I even had a meltdown after one of our phone conversations, but I’d never let him hear my own sense of loss. When I met his mother in March, I thought she seemed healthier than my mom physically, but just as unhealthy mentally from dementia. She suffered from Lewy body dementia; my mother had vascular dementia. A lot has changed in three months. We didn’t see this...
by Yanick Rice Lamb | Jun 23, 2014 | Books |
Sibling rivalry was never really a problem for me, but all that changed when my father stood me up for Thanksgiving. On the eve of Turkey Day, I developed a case of Obama envy. You’ve heard of “outside children?” Well, President Barack Obama has an outside family. He has two dads: Barack Hussein Obama Sr. and a surrogate, William Radford Rice, the father he “stole” from me during his first run for the White House. Daddy Rice helped him get there. Like any good father, he always believed that Barack was “The One.” He talked about him incessantly and told everyone he would become the first black president of the United States. Daddy had been saying this long before Barack’s run for Congress, breakout speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and radio rebuttal to one of President Bush’s weekly radio spiels. After Barack blindsided Hillary Clinton and John Edwards during the Iowa Democratic Caucuses in early 2008, it was on. You couldn’t tell Daddy a thing about any other presidential candidate. Daddy loved to debate, and Barack had given him more ammunition to shoot holes into any political argument. It was all Barack, all the time. He was never home when I called him, especially after he helped to open my brother Barack’s campaign office in Albany, Georgia. Small in stature at 5 feet, 4 inches, Daddy was gifted with an outsized personality, a giving, enthusiastic heart, and a warm, ready smile. Although he was pushing 80, no one worked harder campaigning for Barack in Southwest Georgia. Fellow campaign volunteers described him as a tireless worker...
by Yanick Rice Lamb | Jun 21, 2014 | Notes From Nini |
Bill Cathcart was among the honorees at a Negro League Baseball tribute before today’s Bowie Baysox game. Cathcart was a pitcher for the Joe Black National League All-Stars, which played the last of the Negro League teams in the Northeast during the late 50s. Black, who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, was the first African-American pitcher to win a World Series game. I had the pleasure of meeting Cathcart, father of Christopher Cathcart, president of the OneDiaspora Group and an alumnus of Howard University. It’s clear that the apple didn’t fall far from the...
by Yanick Rice Lamb | Jun 19, 2014 | Notes From Nini |
If you thought O.J. Simpson killed his ex-wife, you had to be prepared for intense debates at home or the barbershop back in the day. But a new CNN poll indicates that some African Americans now believe that O.J. did it. Fifty-three percent of African Americans surveyed say that the charges are true, according to a new poll by CNN/ORC International. That’s a reversal from 1994, when only 24 percent thought the charges were true, but 60 percent believed Simpson was innocent. The former NFL star was later acquitted. CNN released the findings to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. The results were based on land-line and cell phone calls to 1,549 white respondents and 143 black respondents in a two-part survey. Sampling errors were plus or minus 8 percentage points for black respondents. TRIAL OF THE CENTURY: Prosecutor Christopher Darden tries to convince the court that all evidence in the death of Nicole Brown Simpson points to her ex-husband, O.J. Simpson. (CNN...
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