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Kathy's Family needs your help!

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Our family needs your help and a small donation ($5, $10, $20, or a level you feel that you can help) to aid in paying for upcoming Court Trial Costs / Fees (Trial starts - Jan 2020). Our mom was diagnosed and was being treated for Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Our Mom's story is important for other Elderly HL patients and HL patient awareness.

We are appealing to everyone's awareness, dread, and fear of Cancer. Add to that a Breach of Standard of Care and Lack of Informed Consent, by treating specialist doctors, and their actions ultimately causing additional harm, ending your loved one's life. All while your loved one wants so desperately to survive a cancer diagnosis and the treatment. It is unfathomable... but it happened to our mom. 

What happened to our mom:
Our incredibly sweet, nurturing mom put her trust and faith in a group of doctors to care for her and treat her, when she was diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin's Lymphoma (one of the most curable cancers, even at Stage IV).  Our family put our trust in the doctors to help our mom.

Our mom died of predictable, preventable, avoidable lung damage only a few short months after starting chemotherapy. She didn't die from cancer, but from new onset lung damage caused by one of the chemotherapy drugs (well known to cause lung damage, especially high risk in elderly patients). The lung damage was occurring from the beginning of and during the months of her treatment. The use of the drug was not stopped early in her treatments (contrary to the drug manufacturer's FDA product insert documentation guidance), as it should have been stopped at the first hint of adverse lung changes that were detected both on X-ray and physical exams. Additional subsequent regular physical exams and X-rays noted adverse lung changes and abnormal breath sounds. The creeping, developing damage was not treated or addressed in any way by her doctors across 3 months. At her last treatment, she was given another drug which rapidly worsened her lung damage (like pouring gasoline on a fire!!), and within 3 days, she was in a hospital Intensive Care Unit-  ICU on a ventilator. This drug too, in combination with the other risk elevating drug, poses a compounding risk, especially in elderly patients. Lung damage risk of the first drug alone, and the risk of using them together is well known. In essence, about two weeks before she died, she was rushed to the hospital Emergency Room with rapid onset, severe difficulty breathing. Then she was placed on a ventilator and remained in this condition for the last 11 days of her life in the ICU, with progressively worsening lung failure/damage, heavily sedated, with her arms and legs strapped to the hospital bed. While a person is on a ventilator, they will be receiving elevated concentrations of oxygen (more than regular room or outdoor environment). Frighteningly, the severity and type of lung damage my mom was being harmed by, worsens in the presence of high concentrations of oxygen (oxidative damage). On the last day of her life, doctors in the ICU advised myself and my family that there was nothing left that could be done because her lungs were too far damaged and other organs were failing due to her heart struggling and increasingly poor oxygenation in her body and organs. My family was faced with making the most difficult decision of our adult and entire lives. Our incredible, wonderful mom was removed from the ventilator and subsequently died soon after, suffocating 'til death.

Our family had been concerned about her care in the preceding months. Then the sudden shock of how quickly she declined after the introduction of the last drug (which she hadn't received before), we decided to pursue a Medical Malpractice/Wrongful Death lawsuit against her treating doctors.

We have been in this lawsuit process for 4 years now, since her death in 2015.

It has been a difficult, all consuming path pursuing justice for our mom. But we persevere at every obstacle we're confronted with. At this point, we are nearing trial (Jan 2020) with an attorney team and medical expert witnesses opining that the substance of our case is that a breach of standard of care did in fact occur, and a lack of informed consent in fact occurred, and cause of death is known.

We're asking for your help with your donation and to help spread the word and raise money to help us pay trial/court expenses, because trial expenses are coming in 20to30 days (Jan 2020) and our family cannot pay for the trial expenses at the scope and amounts that they likely will be. At this point our goal is $8000, but we don't actually know the amount, but this should help in a big way to supplement what we are already paying and have paid.

We need your help to reach the end of this process for justice for our mom.

What happened to her was not fair and she did not deserve what happened to her. She was a wonderful person, a great mom, a very sweet grandma, and she like so many, put her trust in her doctors. 

The sad truth is that our mom's death, due to lung destruction, was preventable, and avoidable, and she likely could have continued on with her chemotherapy (minus the first risk elevating drug, a completely reasonable option for her), and achieved potential remission of her cancer and live on with us, her family. She was our mom and grandma to our children. Her time with us and her grandsons was taken from her.

We hope that once this court case trial reaches it's end, we can help educate other families by telling our mom's treatment story and how she died and why, and how special care and consideration is needed for elderly Hodgkin Lymphoma patients. We don't want other families to experience what we have experienced.

Lethal Bleomycin Lung Toxicity - know the risks -         http://bit.ly/2LxAgcK

We're asking your help to spread the word thru your friends, family, co-workers, and social media contacts...

Thank you,

On behalf of the family

Organisateur

David Murphy
Organisateur
Costa Mesa, CA

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