In Memory

Michael O'Day

Michael O'Day



 
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03/24/15 10:52 AM #1    

Alex Duckworth-Ford (Alex Ford)

Mike O'Day. We are going to miss you Buddy! Our support prayers and best wishes to Rose O'Day as well upon losing her beloved brother. We will remember you always for your great smile and conviviality around the HHS campus. Alex Duckworth-Ford


03/27/15 09:57 PM #2    

Bruce C. Harris

Dear Alex and Mike's Hilltop classmates,

Bruce Harris is letting me use his password to post this comment about my dear brother.  I hope you all don't mind, but I feel I know many of you as friends even though I was a year behind. 

We lost Mike on March 18, 2015, after a brief illness that caused kidney failure.  There are no words to describe the loss that my sisters and I feel.  It was just so sudden, and he was only 69 years old.  I know that many of you will remember his woodie and surfing days, but I remember him as the big brother who always took me with him on his surfing adventures and gave me big hugs at school.  Mike worked for the City of San Diego as a landscape gardener, and he transfered that talent to his beautiful back yard. Mike still loved to surf, even though at the end he had to surf on his knees (he had neuropathy from chemo).  He loved to backpack, kayak, mountain bike, and snow ski as well. He had a heart of gold.  I just wanted to share a few of my memories of Mike.  Thank you for letting me "invade" your website.  Best wishes to you all. 

Rosie O'Day Mason

Here is one of my favorite recent pictures of Mike.


07/23/20 10:50 AM #3    

Alex Duckworth-Ford (Alex Ford)

Thanks, Rosie. It was at about the time or just after Mike died that I started the battle of my life where the doctors couldn't tell me what was wrong but they were happy to tell me that most of my "labs" looked good.Ultimately diagnosed with Chronic Colitis, apparently I had a particularly bad case of it. Thanks to greed, I believe on the part of the medical profession, I was given a combination of worthless medications for at least a year or more before Kaiser managed to give me a medication made by a pharma called, "Lialda." Designed not to work after three weeks of effort, I cointinued to slip and lose weight with no energy to leave the bed or couch, a byproduct of this disease (not classified by Kaiser as auto-immune), my arms eventually looked more like sticks that arms. Then the tiniest flicker of hope after 4.5 months. Somehow by the Grace of God, the medication and a strict diet I was on, began to work. For several weeks I started to feel "a little better," and at the same time four years of depression began to lift. Since the time in 2018, late in the year, I've been getting better a little at a time. Even though I will never have the endurance that some "seniors" have, I thank God that I'm alive. I don't know why people like Mike and Roger Buckhorn got these diseases and didn't make it. It's the great mandela, the wheel of life. Along with the Golden Rule, I suppose we should stop whatever it is we are thinking and take a world view or a bigger view than just us. Perhaps step back and then just choose kindness. Hope that people have or had the best of intentions but might not have verbalized them like they wanted to. To those who remain to remember the people they loved, thank you.  Alex Duckworth-Ford


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