You Never Know...

...who you will find in the paper.

I was reading the LA Times this morning and an article on the front page regarding magic mushrooms caught my eye. You can speculate all you want to on my interests in psilocybin. Anyway I am reading the article and it is about a woman named Pam Sakuda and I look at my wife and say, "Hey, I worked with a Pam Sakuda at SOGITEC in Long Beach in the 1980s." I read on and the article describes her as a "Long Beach software developer."

The article continues to a back page and there is a picture of Pam, horse-teeth and all, smiling at the camera. The article is about Pam's use of mushrooms to cure the depression she had when finding out she had terminal cancer. It went on to say..

In Sakuda's case, weeks of counseling planted a desire to overcome her fears and sense of isolation. Since her diagnosis, she had avoided friends and kept her feelings bottled up.

The experiment took place in a comfortable hospital room, under the close watch of a medical team. She wore eyeshades and headphones with soft music playing.

Sakuda recalled sensing her husband's sadness over her illness and feeling a burden lifted from her.
"It is not logical. It comes to you like that," she said.

Sakuda died Nov. 10. Her husband, Norbert Litzinger, feels that the drug made a difference. "There was a rebirth around her and it didn't stop."

Pam was a strange person, a real computer geek. She came to the company with her own computer, one of the first "portable" computers. I think we called them a "luggable," one of those huge 30 lb. Compaqs, with the keyboard that snapped on the front of it and the small green screen that was exposed when the keyboard was removed. I can still see her walking to her office every morning, leaning over at a ridiculous angle to support that huge computer. She was a short Japanese woman with a huge horse-tooth grin. She was intense and a little scary, but actually a very kind person. I haven't thought of her in twenty years.