Like most children, I idolized my father, the more because he was everyone's hero, a firefighter and I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. As a black woman, though, that was a nonstarter in the 60s and 70s in Midwest America. As I grew up to stories about the racial (my mom was a surgical nurse and there were enormous barriers to her in the workplace as well) and civil rights struggles around the dinner table, I began to wonder and resolve to study the effects of that stress on his health. He fought fires on the streets of Toledo and harassment and discrimination in the firehouse to the extent that he and his peers started a separate professional union for blacks as they were not welcome in the IAFF, which should be a source of national shame. Suffering his first heart attack in the 80s, he retired a lieutenant from the fire division, returned to school and was dead from heart failure at 63 in 1991 just before the completion of his doctoral dissertion.

My own study and practice of medicine has centered around preventative cardiology and the relationship of psychosocial stress and social justice issues on health. I started the nonprofit Right To Health to address preventable diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and stroke in minority populations and am gratified to see respected research now validating the role that these pervasive stressors are having on at-risk populations, those costing us all the most in financial and more importantly human terms. My mother is a health promotion advocate and stroke survivor as well as an icon of health education in my home town and it was at her knee that I learned the importance of minority recruitment into health care fields, ethnocentric outreach, treatment and empowerment in these issues. At this historic time in America, I feel so blessed and challenged to fight with my parents' voices and the spirit of my forebears against preventable disease and for the unheard voices in our communities. We can vote for healthcare reform with our lifestyle and behavior as well as our political will. Join me.