wwyd fight like hell

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PURPLE DAY
this friday is alzheimers awareness day 
many businesses are going purple 
the employees are wearing purple to increase
awareness for this disease
austins skyline and other cities will have their
skylines lit up purple for this day 
so 
wear purple on friday 

WWYD FIGHT LIKE HELL
we all know what wwjd means
but wwyd
means what would you do 
if you or your family or your wife or your daughter
or your friend was faced with this situation

wwyd



this is about lindsay jones who was an avid runner
and wife and librarian
she was a big runner and had ran some marathons
she was a wife and was excited that finally after trying
for awhile she was pregnant 
and she was a librarian
not any librarian
one of those special librarians that you remember and 
who finds ways to encourage kids to read

my wife had an occasion to interact with her once
she teaches in an alternative high school and was trying to 
find an elementary school to let her students skype and interact
with elementary kids 
none of the librarians at the more than 30 schools in the district
would agree to do this except for lindsay jones
both the high school kids and elementary kids enjoyed the 
experience

lindsay was not afraid to try things different
my wife was so impressed with lindsay jones and was saddened
as she followed her story over the next months
her online journals were hard to read sometime

i had trouble reading them knowing what was coming

lindsay jones was so excited that she was pregnant as she 
and her husband had wanted a child for awhile
she was doing everything right to stay healthy

then at about 20 weeks of her pregnancy she was told that she 
had melanoma
melanoma can be simple-remove the lesion and if caught early 
you are essentially cured
if caught later it can spread and can be more difficult to treat

hers was the latter
she needed aggressive cancer treatment 
the problem there was a good chance that the fetus would
be harmed

she had a choice 
a difficult choice to make

undergo cancer treatment with the effects of chemo on her and 
her fetus with the risk that the fetus would be permanently harmed
she would survive though or she might not

terminate the pregnancy at this time and undergo chemo to save
her life

continue the pregnancy and hold off chemo and treatment until 
the baby was born

you see sometimes pregnancy does funny things to the bodys 
immune system 
people with rheumatoid arthritis will have it go away until after
the baby is born 
people with latent tb will have it become activated and tb infection 
can harm the mom and the baby 
melanoma could it be more aggressive because of pregnancy 

wwyd

this is one of those tough choices that patients have to make 
sometimes and
as a physician you have to be non judgemental in whatever
decision that is made
despite your own political or religious or personal views

your job is to be supportive and when the decision is made on 
what to do you have to make sure that patient gets the best
care thats available 

because there is no good answer to this 

ive thought about this a lot as a father and as a physician and 
im not sure what i would do if this was my daughter or my 
daughterinlaw or my sister or my wife
but whatever decision was made i would be there for her

her best chance to live is to terminate the pregnancy and undergo
chemo as soon as possible
waiting 5 months with a pregnancy suppressed immune system 
could be fatal
she if she survived the chemo and the disease could try again later

doing chemo with the pregnancy could lead to her survival but there
is a good chance the baby would be born with problems or could die
in utero

lindsay jones made the choice
to complete the pregnancy then immediately undergo chemo and 
cancer treatment
she decided to fight like hell and that she could beat this melanoma

she delivered a healthy baby girl named reece
lindsay underwent treatment but after several months she died last
october

she fought like hell to beat this melanoma 
she did have a year with her daughter
her daughter will grow up without her mom 
but her mom gave her that gift
that gift of life

wwyd

here are links to her story

the organicgreen doctor