What I posted to discussion board...just incase you didn't see it...I need ideas!!

Hello everyone…
For my topic I have chosen “Pregnant with Cancer"
I picked this topic because it hits home for me and my family…
I posted this on our last discussion last unit, but for those of you that didn’t get to read it because I posted later in the week…

This is something that has a personal impact on me. In February, my 25 year old sister-in-law was happy as could be...her husband had just got home from his first tour in Iraq and things were just getting back to normal. She was excited to announce that she was pregnant with their first child. Everything was going great and then in June at a regular check-up, she had the dreaded glucose testing...she went home from the Dr's appt. and enjoyed the rest of the day when she awakened by a phone call at 1am. It was her doctor telling her to get to the hospital RIGHT AWAY! Frightened, her and her husband jumped in the car and drove to the hospital. Once there they started hooking her up to IV's and running tests and then the doctor came in and sat on the foot of her bed and told her that she had acute Leukemia. Her she is, 25 years old, things are going great and the doctor is looking her in the eye telling her that she has cancer. Her first thought was "Oh my gosh...the baby!!" At this time she was only 25 weeks pregnant, so the chance of survival of the baby was slim but it wasn't unheard of. The next few days were very hard on her...making tough decisions. The doctors told her that she was far enough along that they could administer a low dose of chemo and it wouldn't affect the baby and possibly buy her time to let the baby get further along...the next few weeks were horrible...she was sick and weak from the chemo and yet all she could think about was the baby, not worrying about herself...2 weeks after the chemo treatment was done, she had a second bone marrow biopsy and amazingly...it was clean!!! The low dose chemo had appeared to have done the trick. The doctors wanted to administer a few more doses just as a precaution, but still needed to wait until the baby was born...so, at 29 weeks, they delivered the baby. Because she would have to wait awhile for her c-section site to heal all the way before she could start the next round of chemo, they decided to go ahead and deliver the baby. They didn't want to take the chance of letting the cancer come back....
As of today…the baby is a little over a month old and has been home for about 2 weeks and my sister-in-law has to undergo 2 more rounds of chemo in the next 2 months as a precautionary measure and after that she will have to go through blood testing once a month for awhile. But she is totally clean of the leukemia and truly lucky. The
Good Lord was on her side. So this is why I picked this topic…

My thesis statement is…
Being diagnosed with leukemia during pregnancy is very rare and poses a clinical challenge for doctors treating these patients. In addition it also causes concerns between maternal survival and fetal health in both short and long term.

My resource is:
Paterson,(Aug 2004) GayeBritish Journal of Midwifery; Vol. 12 Issue 8, p496-501, 6p

I really don’t know if my thesis is good enough or not…please everyone help me out and give me a few ideas….thanks so much=)