The Boomer Magazine

  The Martin Agency’s Mike Hughes finds grace and humor in his last days – BY BARBAR FITZGERALD –   Mike Hughes, president of The Martin Agency, Richmond’s advertising powerhouse, was told this past December at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York that he had two weeks to live. As an old newspaperman [...]

7 Stories of Hope: ‘It’s Given Me My Life Back’ — Backpack-size portable heart driver fills in for a transplant – BY ROB WALKER – For the first time in two years, Paula Heggins was home for the holidays. She’d spent the previous two in the hospital dealing with a hereditary heart condition that came close [...]

7 stories of Hope: ‘How Close I Came’ — New leukemia therapy is showing promise in clinical trial – BY TERRI L. JONES –  When standard chemotherapy wasn’t delivering the desired results for Roberta Richardson’s leukemia, her oncologist recommended she participate in a clinical trial at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Massey Cancer Center. Being a test subject [...]

7 Stories of Hope: ‘The Breast was Perfectly Rebuilt from My Stomach’ — Use of natural tissue for breast reconstruction helps resolve lymphedema – BY TERRI L. JONES – At 41, Betty Halligan (not her real name) had a lumpectomy and 27 lymph nodes removed, along with radiation and chemotherapy, for breast cancer. For most [...]

Basketball team’s successes help lift the entire university – BY STEVE CLARK –      Time was – and not that long ago – countless Americans, including many college basketball fans, had no idea what the initials VCU meant. Imagine what some of those people might have guessed. Vegetarian Curmudgeons United? Very Cool Underwear? To illustrate [...]

For the second year, we asked readers to nominate local baby boomers and others who have the “It” factor – the thing that makes them stand out as interesting, influential and inspiring. The nine people profiled on the following pages, we are convinced, have “It.” They are this year’s winners of BOOMER’s “It List” awards. [...]

BY BRIANA EASTER KIRBY In the end, the hallucinations began and my mother seemed more an Alzheimer’s patient than a woman dying of cancer. She’d ask us, “What happened to me?” My heart would break. My mother, Cindy, was diagnosed with stage-IV colon cancer in 2006, just before her 47th birthday. The cancer metastasized to [...]