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Tragedy a potent reminder AIDS
is everyone's concern |
| On the sign at Carol Fox Park, Jersey
Village will soon add a second bronze plaque in memory of
another member of the Fox family killed by AIDS. When it arrives from the engraver, the memorial to Megan Fox, who died 12 days before her 12th birthday, will be placed below the plaque dedicated to the memory of her mother, Carol Fox, for whom the park is named. Fox, who served as Jersey Village city secretary from 1975 to 1991, was widely known and loved in the community. Friends of the Fox family - of whom there are many - and city officials recently gathered at the park to present Jay Fox, Carol Fox's widower and Megan Fox's father, with a copy of the memorial which will tell about his daughter, who was his only child. "Sometimes I'm angry; sometimes I'm bitter; sometimes I'm OK," says Fox. When Carol Fox was dying, the public was told the cause was cancer. That was true, but not the whole story. What wasn't told was that the cancer was the result of AIDS. But Jay Fox no longer wants the cause to be a secret, in part because he wants people to understand that typical families such as his - not just homosexuals or drug users - can become victims of the disease. He is determined to help educate the public about AIDS. He's even putting together a home page on the World Wide Web about AIDS and telling his family's story. The story of the Fox family is that of a tragic irony, because a surgical procedure which made Megan Fox's conception and birth possible also resulted in her and her mother's death. In 1982 Carol Fox was told she needed surgery to remove fibroid tumors before she could have a baby. During the surgery she received a blood transfusion. Testing of donated blood for the AIDS virus did not begin until 1985. Megan was born in 1984, and all seemed well until November 1990 when blood tests following another routine surgery showed Carol had a low white blood cell count. Remembering the transfusion in 1982, Carol asked her doctor if she might have AIDS. He ordered the test to put her mind at rest. But the day before Thanksgiving, he told her she had tested positive for HIV - the AIDS virus. A few weeks later, when the results of blood tests on Jay Fox and Megan Fox came back, the family learned that Megan Fox was also infected. She was probably born infected, Jay Fox says. Carol Fox and her daughter were both put on the same drug. Knowing they were both taking the same medication, Megan Fox knew she had the same infection as her mother, Jay Fox says. He says his wife was afraid of how children would treat Megan if they knew she and her mother were HIV positive, so the family kept it a secret until Carol Fox's death. In July 1991, the doctors discovered she had cancer, which is one of the diseases which prey on those whose immune systems have been weakened by the AIDS virus. For the next five months the family watched as Carol Fox was weakened more and more by the cancer, until she died on Christmas Day, 1991. That summer Jay Fox quit his job, sold the house in Jersey Village and "took Megan on a whirlwind tour of Alaska." He says it was on the tour that they began telling people about Megan's infection. The positive sympathetic feedback they received encouraged the family to become even more public with the information. Jay Fox wanted his daughter enrolled in some of the AIDS treatments of Dr. Philip Pizzo, one of the world's leading researchers on AIDS who works at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The family moved to the little fishing village of St. Michael's, Md., where his wife had grown up and where she was buried and which was less than two hours from the National Institutes of Health. They rented a house across the street from Megan Fox's grandparents. Jay Fox met with the elementary school principal and then with the whole faculty to discuss his daughter's condition. Encouraged by the positive responses they received on the tour, he went even more public and gave a talk on AIDS at the school. "I used a little reverse psychology," Fox says. "I educated the community by telling the kids at school, and letting them take the information home. Unknowingly, I was creating a support group of the entire community for Megan and myself. We never heard any negative comment from anyone in the community. We never had a parent who would not let their child play with Megan. She had many invitations to spend the night." Megan Fox and her father took many opportunities to travel, eventually visiting 44 states and seven Canadian provinces, and they used the travel opportunities to speak about AIDS. But by the fall of 1993, the grade-schooler's infection had become full-blown AIDS, and as she weakened the family stayed closer to home since she needed more continuous medical treatments and transfusions. On June 3, 1996, Megan Fox died. At her funeral, the church was filled, with at least 300 people attending, Jay Fox says. Many were her classmates, who later held a march against AIDS in her memory. The school plans to make the march an annual event. They are determined to continue her fight. (Front Page Editorial on |
