I just got home from taking the Psychiatry NBME Subject Exam and logged onto MSNBC.com and saw this story. It’s a story of a mother, Kristen LaBrie who withheld chemotherapy medications from her autistic son for at least 5 months. He died at the age of 9 in 2009. A judge has sentenced her to 8-10 years.
I don’t know what she was thinking. A quote from the news story:
Her son was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2006. The tragedy is that her son’s oncologist believed that he had a cure rate of about 85-90% under an intensive two-year treatment plan.“If I could do it differently, I would, because I certainly miss my son, and I think about him every day and I wish he could be with me and my family,” she said.
But for whatever reason, she stopped giving his medication.
Source: MSNBC.com – Mom who withheld son’s cancer meds gets 8-10 years