Saturday, July 12, 2008

A Tale of Two Obituaries

I don't usually deviate from my theme of "Telecommuting: Yay!" but I feel compelled to comment about two people who died this week: Tony Snow (Fox News lackey and White House Spokesperson) and Michael DeBakey (pioneer of a zillion kinds of important heart surgery). They've been yakking non-stop about Tony Snow. Dr. DeBakey has been relegated to the crawl.

Look, I'm sure Mr. Snow was a lovely human being. I am sorry his children and wife will be deprived of his company, and he was far too young to die. Cancer is terrible, and for the record, I'm against it.

But seriously, Dr. DeBakey directly (and indirectly through the several generations of heart surgeons he personally trained or who have the benefit of his techniques, surgical tools, and so on) SAVED THOUSANDS OF LIVES...never mind the more than 50,000 operations he performed himself. Artificial heart: check. Ventricular transplants: check. Key technologies that allow heart-lung bypass machines to work: that was him, too. He began to change the practice of medicine when he was a student in the 1930s, served in World War II, and pretty much rocked the cardiac surgical world for more than fifty years.

Tony Snow was on TV for a while, and told us what the Bush administration wanted us to hear.

Maybe Larry King should search his (surgically-intervened upon and working only because of people like Dr. DeBakey) heart and spend some time talking about someone who really had an impact on the world. I am not a journalist and I don't know what qualifies as newsworthy (obviously).

But am I crazy here?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Tony Snow. Ugh. It's sad and shocking to see someone so (relatively) young and successful die from a horrible disease like colon cancer; however, I'd like to go on the record saying that I hope his death raises awareness of colon cancer and overshadows his icky role in the Bush Administration.

PS - We need you here:

http://www.hrbloggers.com/forum/topic/show?id=2141137%3ATopic%3A3129

Stella Commute said...

Thanks for your comment, Laurie. I agree -- the older I get (and the older my relatively old husband gets) the more I am utterly horrified by people dying at an age I can imagine myself being in the foreseeable future. It stinks! Would that we could all live a life like Dr. DeBakey -- full of real and positive impact on humanity, and loooooooong.

Thanks for the heads-up on the HR group...I'm IN