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Sarah Tran with her daughter
Image: Josh Geller
Sarah Tran was determined to continue teaching property law in the fall of 2012, despite a 28-day hospital stay for the treatment of leukemia.
"I was diagnosed with acute leukemia on October 13," says Tran, an assistant law professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in Dallas. "Actually, it was my second time getting it," she says.
She had undergone a bone marrow transplant from a brother four years earlier, but she learned during the fall semester that the disease had returned.
"I felt like the students had been planning to take my exam and should be able to rely on a certain style of teaching," Tran says. "I felt like I couldn't abandon them."
So on Wednesdays and Fridays, from 1:00 to 2:20 p.m., a sign on her hospital room door at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas asked those entering to be quiet while she conducted class for 80 first-year students via Skype.
"Sometimes, a machine I was hooked up to would start beeping, but they [medical staff] knew not to talk to me while they fixed it," she says.
Her husband brought her a suit jacket that she would wear over hospital clothes.
"I pretended like I was wearing a suit," she says.
As she began to lose hair, a typical side effect of chemotherapy treatment, Tran says she kept changing her look.
