(I haven't been active here for quite a while but I figured what the heck, I'll show up again. This isn't exactly standard Kos fare but it might interest some people.)
I am just aghast at the actions of the Essex County, Massachusetts District Attorney who is prosecuting a mother for attempted murder because she failed to administer chemotherapy to her young son, who later died of lymphoma.
That probably sounds pretty awful but here are the facts. . .
She was single, trying to cope by herself with the demanding caregiving regimen for a severely sick child. She observed that the chemotherapy made him much sicker, and she was afraid it would kill him. So she stopped it. She had no support, the doctors weren't communicating with her, she believed he was rid of the cancer, she had nobody to talk to or advise her, so she made a wrong decision. That's all. It's tragic but exactly who is to blame here?
Recently I've been educating myself about pediatric lymphatic cancers. Children who fail chemotherapy are given hematopoeitic stem cell transplants (HSCT) as a last resort therapy. (These are popularly called bone marrow transplants but that is imprecise. It is the stem cells that produce blood cells, not the marrow per se, that is infused.) First they destroy the child's stem cells, then they replace them with donor cells. This means the child's immune system is completely destroyed; it takes up to two years for it to fully reconstitute as the various types of white blood cells start to be produced one by one.
Meanwhile the child has to take a complex medication regimen, including, ironically, immunosuppressives to prevent the donor cells from attacking the child's own body (which is called graft versus host disease). Because the child is highly vulnerable to infection during this time, families have to take extraordinary precautions -- meticulous hygiene, excluding visitors with contagious diseases, limited contact with pets, no houseplants, no playing outdoors, no crowds -- which means no school, no birthday parties, no restaurants or baseball games or parades. The child faces strict dietary restrictions. Caregivers must be alert to any signs of infectious disease and contact doctors if they see any.
Now just imagine -- you've been trying to nurture and comfort this child who has been horribly ill, tortured with chemotherapy and all sorts of painful and terrifying procedures in a strange city (only a few hospitals in the country do these procedures) and a weird alien environment. You yourself have been desperately afraid of losing the child. Now you have to transform yourself into a drill sergeant, and deny the person you love most in the world most of what children desire. Grandma and Aunt Tilly may well have different ideas about what is best for the child. The siblings feel neglected and also deprived in many ways. The doctors are 500 miles away and you have no support.
I expect that something has to give. Complete adherence to these demands is just impossible. I don't know that people are likely to completely understand and remember all the rules anyway, but regardless, they will have to make decisions about what is most important and where they can make an exception or relax one of the rules. Maybe they decide that a certain medication isn't really necessary, or it's okay to go to the sleepover, or to Grandma's house. Whatever.
There is a very high rate of complications and sometimes the kids end up dying of the common cold. But you don't prosecute the mother.