Although I have planned to die with my dignity intact, the physicians I have seen in Muskegon have done everything they can to strip me of it. The physicians appear to try and control patients like me with "fear and degradation" (as was mentioned by a french doctor in the movie "Sicko"), and treatment for people like me has been predetermined because of race and money/greed (how much money you have, the kind of insurance you have, etc.). In the process of doing this, while they have refused to perform a biopsy, they have often laughed at me, looked at me with disgust, and treated me as though I deserve this. And while I do not have AIDS/HIV, I can certainly identify with what many gay men went through in the 1980s. Furthermore, about a year to a year an a half ago, an elderly black woman was taken to the Hackley Hospital ER by her daughter and was not let in. Thus nobody saw her, and unfortunately she died about a day or so later due to a staph infection that would have been treatable had they let her in to be seen. Though I believe this can happen to elderly people of any color here in Muskegon.

Though I think prayer from my family and friends has kept me strong, I know that my life will be ending soon. I have also been a type 1 diabetic since the age of 19, and having a cancer this serious makes it very brittle and uncontrollable. I recently was hospitalized at Hackley for diabetic ketoacidosis, and slipped down to a blood sugar of 10 while I had an IV in my arm and was under their care. And while I've spent my 30's suffering with bone marrow pain while most of my friends were getting married and settling down with their families, I have had to live with my parents because I am too ill to take care of myself and work. Most of the physicians, unfortunately, are so racist and narcissistic they choose to tell themselves that this is what I want. Yeah they tell themselves I want to be sick and all kinds of twisted crap so they can continue reap abuse on people like me and not feel bad about it. And as for all the physicians whom I have seen in Muskegon, there always remains one question they are unwilling to answer: Why don't you prove me wrong and have a lymph node biopsy performed if your so sure I don't have a recurrence of Non Hodgkins Lymphoma? They say it's because they have no proof but that depends on how close of an examination they do because all they really need to do is take a better look at my skin and lymph nodes. The physicians have told my mother things like if I "had NHL I wouldn't be able to walk" or my lymph nodes would be so large they would be bulging out of my neck and visible by just looking at them. Well we have known people with NHL and they could walk and didn't have visible lymph nodes but I guess they trying to make me fit their particular profile. My mother and I were also recently told that if I had a recurrence of NHL my lymph nodes would not at times get bigger and smaller, which is also false according to a recently published article in the New York Times because "some lymphoma's cause on and off lymph node swelling" (http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/non-hodgkins-lymphoma/diagnosis.html)

Well, I am telling all of you that this will not happen to another person in Muskegon if I have anything to say about it. And remember...Karma's a bitch.