Ten miles south of my job at the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, an Asian American elder opened fire and killed one person at the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, CA.
We hoped that our city might be “the last place this ever happened.”
Before May 14, 2022, if you mentioned Buffalo, NY, my mind would have taken me back to the city I knew in the 1960s. I grew up there. I was a kid from the ‘hood whose grandmother instilled messages about living a life based on grace and humility from day one. I was a Head Start kid surrounded by people who believed in the power of providing possibility. I was a kid from the poor, Black neighborhood that bordered the poorer, Black neighborhood, but I was rich in the experiences that earned me an acceptance letter to the University of Notre Dame where I got the foundation I needed to go to medical school. It is Buffalo, however, where I got the foundation I needed for life.
Tuesday began a typical day in May in South Texas for me as executive director of the Mays Cancer Center. It was a lovely sunny day for late spring, and at our center we were focused, as we are each day, on the core mission we have had for almost 50 years—to decrease the burden of cancer in San Antonio, South Texas and beyond.
