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Missouri Mother Died As She Did Not Get Her Cancer Treated Due To Her Fourth Pregnancy

By R. Siva Kumar | Update Date: Dec 14, 2015 02:32 PM EST

St. Louis mother, Cara Combs, 38, was excited that she was going to get her fourth baby.

But she also found out a devastating bit of news---that she had stage IV melanoma, 25 weeks after she became pregnant.

Stage IV melanomas spread quickly to the lymph nodes and other parts of the body, explains the American Cancer Society.

Hence, while skin tumors or enlarged lymph nodes may get removed through surgery or treated with radiation therapy, metastases in internal organs are tough to tackle.

As she felt that the therapy for cancer may harm her foetus, Combs just delayed the treatment, even though her oncologist advised her not to.

"There's no good decision here," she wrote, according to Combs' Facebook page. "We will both be fighting for our lives and I feel incredibly guilty about that."

So she died just three days after she gave birth to Shaylin Combs on Dec. 5, whose birth weight was just two pounds, 1.2 ounces, according to Fox News.

Her cancer affected her liver, said health officials. She could not recover due to the baby.

"She sacrificed everything so her legacy could live on," Ray Combs, her husband, wrote of his wife on the family's GoFundMe page.

Currently, the family has raised more than $50,000 of their $100,000 goal for the expenses of the family.

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