Summer Vacation
I'm heading on a much needed break from work and the local landscape for the next week or so -- posting will be light, but I still have a few special topics I've been hoping to delve into and will be attempting to write as much as I can while on hiatus from official office duties and the attendant imprisonment in the office cubicle.
Yeah, I know -- it's a hard-knock life, but thank god, it's my hard-knock life.
While you're looking here for some kind of extended entry (I'm on vacation, don't you get it?), please check out the Susan M. Torres Fund page.
26 year old Susan Torres, pregnant with her second child and suffering from undiagnosed melanoma, collapsed on May 7th and has been declared brain dead by the doctors at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington. Doctors told her husband, Jason Torres, that there was no hope, medically, for his wife to recover, but they could keep her alive for the child. Jason and Susan's family, though devastated by Susan's condition, made the difficult decision of keeping Susan on life support, determined to make sure that the child she was carrying will survive to be born prematurely and cared for in the hospital's pediatric ICU until healthy enough to go home with the father.
The target is mid-July, when Susan will be about 25 weeks pregnant — 15 weeks short of a full pregnancy. That's the gestation age, doctors say, where a baby can survive outside the womb, though with rather definite risks to the child. Jason's goal is for Susan and the baby to reach the 30-week mark, when such risks are greatly diminished, but the melanoma which caused so much damage to Susan may yet spread throughout the rest of Susan's body and mar the chances for her baby's survival.
"I hate seeing her on those darned (life support) machines," Jason Torres says, "and I hate using her as a husk, a carrying case, because she herself is worth so much more. But Susan really wanted this baby . . . There's not a glimmer of doubt in my mind that this is what she would have wanted."
With each passing day, the Torres' hospital bills are mounting, and insurance isn't covering a good portion of them, by $300,000 to $400,000 at last count. There are those who argue that the financial and emotional costs involved far outweigh the value of a child, but if you disagree with that assessment, and you wish to help the Torres family through this situation, then visit the link to the Susan Torres Fund for more information.