Long time White House correspondent Helen Thomas returns to the White House Brady Press Briefing Room after a recent long illness in Washington, Nov. 12, 2008. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Many of you may remember, Helen Thomas, the Dean of White House Correspondents, is my aunt.  She’s covered every president since John F. Kennedy and subjected each of them to the toughest questions of their political careers.  For the first time in her life, Aunt Helen took ill this spring.  In August, she turned 88, and before this illness, she had never been in the hospital.  Can you believe that?  You could if you understood her indomitable will and the fight that is in her.

Aunt Helen hadn’t been feeling well.  Unwisely, she did not address the issue.  She refused to be slowed down or have her life interrupted.  She had important business to do.  The same business she has been doing for 65-years.  The people’s business: ensuring their first amendment right, to her, the greatest of all their freedoms, the “right to know.”

But illness doesn’t know your business nor your rights.  It just attacks where it can, when it can.  It sidelined Aunt Helen like no President ever could.  Our family immediately kicked into action to oversee her medical care, preserve her independence and decision-making (for she demanded that), and do everything within our power and the grace of God to get her back on her feet and back to the most coveted job in journalism, the White House Beat.

I tell you all of this because God granted Aunt Helen her greatest wish.  She worked hard for it, fought with a death-grip determination to face down her illness and come back from it.  And she made it.  She recovered from an intestinal problem that’s proved fatal for many people her age.  That in itself is commendable.  It shocked many on her medical team, but not all.  It certainly didn’t shock us.  And it should not have surprised her colleagues when on Wednesday, she walked, I repeat, walked into the Press Briefing Room of the White House and sat in the chair that is reserved for her and her alone.  All through her illness, that was her goal: to walk under her own power, albeit with a friend’s arm to lean on, and return to her rightful place in the People’s House.

(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

And so, SHE’S BAAACK, feistier than ever, I kid you not.  Look out, Barack Obama.  Helen Thomas is on her own two feet, standing in wait, ready to take on President #10.  Good luck Mr. Obama, and way to go Aunt Helen.