Cary Tennis and King Kaufman
Update: the auction concludes on Wednesday, February 17th at 10:15 PST. Please look for a wrap-up post to follow.
Just before and after the New Year, two of our friends and colleagues at Salon.com, Cary Tennis and King Kaufman, were hit with serious health emergencies.
In November, Cary announced in his beloved advice column that he was diagnosed with a rare cancer (sacral chordoma) and was going to have to undergo surgery, which took place on December 17th. He's been good at keeping us all updated since on his Open Salon blog.In early January, King was suddenly taken ill and hospitalized for a devastating ailment none of us had ever heard of before. One minute he was banging out bellicose e-mails on our usage of the term "healthcare" (one word, not two), and the next his legs buckled under him as he ran for a bus. He ended up unable to walk or even get out of bed for two weeks.King had developed Guillain-Barré syndrome on the heels of a bout of lingering pneumonia, which he contracted at the end of November. We all googled it frantically and our jaws collectively dropped as we watched him go from a belligerent grumpy cuss to a silent grumpy cuss, unable to move. After three weeks in the hospital and a physical rehab center, he is now home, on his way to what his doctors say is likely to be a full recovery.When people are catastrophically ill, it seems that nothing you do can ever be enough. We brought food over. We sent e-mails and made calls. We volunteered baby sitting. And then we decided to mobilize and pull together a bake sale to help take care of all those unforeseen expenses that pile up. There are medical expenses and lost wages, and then there are things you don't even think of, like the $16 a day parking fee King's wife Jane had to pay at the hospital where King spent 16 days.We'd originally thought of an art sale, but not all of us can draw. We're artists, authors, cooks, photographers, makers of things, both useful and not. We all wanted to help, so over the next few days you'll see us lay out our stuff in public on this blog. (Please be kind. For some of us it's like a public disrobing.)
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About our bake sale
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