Word: julia
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...most intriguing qualities of extraordinary people is that they often don't feel that they are special. As they transform the lives of those around them, they say they are just doing what they have to do. Margaret Mikol is one such hero. In 1978, her daughter Julia was born with severe combined immunodeficiency, which required her to be kept in a completely sterile hospital environment--like the "boy in the bubble." When Julia was 3 months old, she had a bone-marrow transplant that left her with a functioning immune system but unable to breathe...
Margaret moved into the hospital with Julia; her husband Yves continued working back home in Maryland and commuted to New York City on weekends. Julia's hospital bills were about $350,000 annually. The Mikols quickly exhausted their medical insurance and had to rely on Medicaid. Caring for Julia at home would have been about $50,000 a year, but while the Federal Government would reimburse hospital care, it wouldn't cover the cost of caring for a child at home...
Determined to create something closer to a normal family life for their daughter, the Mikols applied to a new federal program that allowed Julia to retain Medicaid coverage while being cared for at home. After a lengthy bureaucratic struggle, Margaret and Yves became the first parents in New York and the second parents in the nation to take home a child on life support. "The process transformed my personality," says Margaret. "I had been a shy and timid person, and I became brassy and obnoxious. I changed into a beast to protect my child...
...next five years, the Mikols did everything they could to give Julia a normal childhood. But when Julia's condition worsened, the 8-year-old refused the recommended heart-and-lung transplant, and her parents reluctantly agreed with her decision. Before her death, Julia asked her mother to promise to help other children. "You got me home," she told Margaret in the sign language she used to communicate. "You've got to get them home...
LONG BEFORE IT WAS COOL TO decry junk food, culinary historian Karen Hess bluntly assessed the state of U.S. cuisine, skewering such sacred cows as Julia Child and James Beard. "Our palates have been ravaged, our food is awful," she wrote in the 1977 book, The Taste of America. "Our most respected authorities ... are poseurs." In later works, Hess pioneered the academic study of food, insisting on primary sources and illuminating Colonial cooking habits in books like Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery, which had remained in the former First Lady's family for generations and was annotated by Hess...