katey gilligan writing to express deep thanks for the day...wow.

some of you may know that i've just gone through a hellish bout with an eye cancer rarely seen in the US - shortish story: sunburned my eye ball sometime somewhere around the equator most likely in a place where ozone is depleted like northern australia or the south pacific = many happy times on the water way out there, even met madge darlington in new zealand on the way... well earned...

our dr don brode actually identified it as a 'problem' in 2004, so i had it surgically removed then and was told that surgery had a 99% success rate BUT it failed and the cancer came back much worse and really busted me this year right after UT graduation without safety nets in place...

my community, very much including you, literally saved my life.

i'm now two weeks out of a radical surgery at md anderson removing a significant part of my eye and featuring sci-fi technology like cryogenic freezing and amniotic stem cell grafts oh and two follow up visits to the ER...and i had not really gone out of my house until i decided to attend the reunion day before yesterday....because i always feel great about what happens at that place and because i just love you people

after jon watson and i wept with pride and joy thru the last act of the reunion play (amazing and totally bought the dvd) doctor ayres came up and said hello and stood looking into my eyes, i have no clue wether or not he knew about the calamity but all i wanted to do was burst out with lines from that poem he reads sometimes....

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Katey Gilligan
Masters in Science
Technology Commercialization
Red McCombs School of Business
The University of Texas at Austin