~ * A Homeless Beauty and the Beast,
Heroin
A Slave to Her Addiction, Young Woman Squanders
Her Family Fortune
& Her Potential * ~
"Rhonda Bye had a lot going for her ~
Brains, beauty, feisty strength.
Heroin and crack crushed it all.
The narcotics ruined her looks and attention span, snuffing out her
potential both as a young clothing model for Nordstrom and as a
computer whiz who could fix office network problems. Three years ago, a
slave to her heroin addiction, Bye landed on San Francisco's streets as
a homeless panhandler.
Still, she refused to give up, fighting her way through a frustrating
maze of city social services to get into housing and drug
rehabilitation. She shook off her addiction, and in the last couple
months she had been talking about retraining to work with computers
again.
But it was too late. Drug abuse and the ravages of street life had
damaged her kidneys so badly that, in mid-February, doctors told her
she would need dialysis for the rest of her life.
She missed her treatments three times in a row and went into a coma
three weeks ago.
On Wednesday, she died. She was 39.
Bye leaves behind two sons and a daughter -- and a lifetime that her
family hopes will be an example, in the harshest way possible, of how
drugs and homelessness can destroy a person."
~ Kevin Fagin,
The San Francisco Chronicle
[Know, Blakely & Page Bass,
That's NOT about me.]
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/25/MNG6OHU6S91.DTL&feed=rss.news
~ * ~
Blog, I'll warrant ye, or dog? Who knows. Pass the grog!
But if ye see me lost pup, please bring that scurvy dog home!
I got Leon a brand-new bone, with a chest full a' booty.
_________________
http://journals.aol.com/virginiaz/DreamingofLeonardo