Woman Induced Labor for Dying Husband to Hold Baby

ABC News:

 

Savannah Aulger will never have snapshots with her father on her first birthday, on Christmas or at a school event.

The only picture she will ever have of them is the one as sweet as it is heartbreaking. Hooked up to an oxygen mask at the hospital, the man she would call dad cradled her in his arms for 45 minutes.

He sobbed. He smiled. And there was no doubt that he loved her.

“He would talk to my stomach when I was pregnant,” Diane Aulger said of her husband. “He was so excited for her.”

The next day, Mark Aulger slipped into a coma.

The Aulger family of The Colony, Texas, had a lot to rejoice about in the weeks before Savannah’s Jan. 18 birth, which was induced two weeks early so her father could hold her.

A home movie on Christmas showed a pregnant Diane Aulger, 31, handing out gifts to their four children, the oldest of whom is 15. Mark, 52, who had just received the news that he had beaten cancer, played the guitar, providing a soundtrack for the Christmas morning festivities.

On Jan. 3, life threw a curveball.

Mark Aulger was admitted to the hospital, unable to breathe.

Doctors told him that eight months of chemotherapy had ravaged his lungs and diagnosed him with pulmonary fibrosis.  “We thought he could get on steroid treatment and oxygen and live for years,” Diane Aulger said.

But on Jan. 16, Mark Aulger found out those treatments would be fruitless. He had one week left to live.

“He was awake and alert, himself. I really didn’t believe the doctor [at first],” Diane Aulger said. “The next day his doctor came in and said: ‘When are you going to have this baby?’”

On Jan. 18, in a larger-than-normal delivery room, Mark rested in his bed, a supportive presence for Diane as their baby girl entered the world.

“The day she was born his oxygen levels were really high,” Aulger said. “He held her for 45 minutes. Him and I just cried that whole time.”

As Diane was recovering, Mark tried holding his daughter again the next day, but was only able to last one minute.  “He just couldn’t take it,” Diane Aulger said.

The devoted husband and father of five slipped into a coma.

“If she cried, he would shake his head and moan. I put her on him when he was in the coma a few times and his hand would move toward her,” Aulger said.

On January 23rd, with his family by his side, Mark Aulger died in his hospital bed.

“The kids go on as if dad is really still here,” Diane Aulger said. “Mark was a very funny guy. My kids still tell jokes how they would when he was around. He would have been a wonderful daddy to Savannah.”

Very sad.

 

Israel Develops Cancer Vaccine

In what is being called, a breakthrough:

Vaxil’s groundbreaking therapeutic vaccine, developed in Israel, could keep about 90 percent of cancers from coming back.
As the world’s population lives longer than ever, if we don’t succumb to heart disease, strokes or accidents, it is more likely that cancer will get us one way or another. Cancer is tough to fight, as the body learns how to outsmart medical approaches that often kill normal cells while targeting the malignant ones.

n a breakthrough development, the Israeli company Vaxil BioTherapeutics has formulated a therapeutic cancer vaccine, now in clinical trials at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem. If all goes well, the vaccine could be available about six years down the road, to administer on a regular basis not only to help treat cancer but in order to keep the disease from recurring.
The vaccine is being tested against a type of blood cancer called multiple myeloma. If the substance works as hoped — and it looks like all arrows are pointing that way — its platform technology VaxHit could be applied to 90 percent of all known cancers, including prostate and breast cancer, solid and non-solid tumors…

Read on here.

 

Homosexuals More Likely to Get Cancer

CNN:

Gay men in California are nearly twice as likely to report a cancer diagnosis as straight men in the state, according to new research published online Monday in the medical journal Cancer.

Few cancer studies investigate how sexual orientation might affect cancer risk and survivorship, often because study participants are not asked about their sexual orientation. In Monday’s study, researchers used a large health survey conducted by the state of California – in which respondents were asked about their orientation – to examine the impact cancer may be having on gays and lesbians in the state.

The results show about 8% of gay men had experienced a cancer diagnosis, compared with only about 5% of straight men. Among straight women and lesbians, the cancer prevalence trends were more closely matched.

Researchers speculate the increased cancer prevalence among gay men is associated with HIV status.

“There’s a higher prevalence of HIV positive men in the gay population, and we know that being HIV positive is related to cancers, so this might drive the differences we found,” said study author Ulrike Boehmer, an associate professor at Boston University School of Public Health.

Anal cancer, lung cancer, testicular cancer and Hodgkin’s lymphoma are more prevalent among men who are HIV positive, Boehmer said.

The study found gay men were also more likely to get cancer at a younger age than straight men – almost 10 years sooner – at the age of 41, on average…

More on the study here.

In Caritate Non Ficta

Philip Johnson is a seminarian suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. He blogs here, documenting his life and faith.

You can read a background here.

And then watch this:

Seminarian Philip Johnson from Deacon Watkins on Vimeo.

Please join us in praying for him. 

HT:   Fr Z