Doctor leaves the world on her own terms
Physician vastly boosted number of Vietnamese bone marrow donors
Anh Reiss was a Houston doctor whose passion — almost a religion — was obstetrics. She brought more than 7,000 babies into the world. She felt honored and privileged to be the first face those infants saw.
But as much as she thought about life and new beginnings, she also thought about death and strong finishes.
Reiss, 48, died of leukemia Feb. 26. After her diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS, in 2009, she became the face of patients in need of bone marrow transplants.
She never found a match herself, which was her only hope of a cure. But she and her family may have doubled the number of Vietnamese bone marrow donors nationwide, and they helped connect some donors and recipients who did match.
In the end, Reiss found the work of signing up do This
nors exhausting and the personal attention embarrassing. She didn’t want people to feel sorry for her. She told her husband, Josh Reiss, “If I have only a few months left in my life, I’m not spending them in hot shopping malls on weekends.”
Instead, she focused on her family, her patients, her practice, her friends. And she consciously expanded her horizons, whether that meant international travel or the study of interior design.
Reiss even got hooked on reality-TV shows about home-design problems and worse: “Fixer Upper” and “Flip or Flop.”
In Reiss’ final days, the television in her room at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center was tuned to a marathon session of “Fixer Upper.” While she watched, she monitored her own heartbeat and platelet and white-blood cell counts. She knew when it was time to bring her daughter home from New York and her son home from Missouri. When it was time to call her husband, who had only left the hospital long enough to shower and change. When it was time for last rites.
By then her illness had turned into virulent blood cancer and pneumonia, but she didn’t want a breathing tube. She thought it pointless.
Pneumonia, she had warned her spouse, meant “game over.”
Anh Phuong Nguyen Reiss was born in Vietnam. She was about 6 when her devout family sent her to live with Catholic sisters; her mom and dad thought she might make a good nun. Anh was back home just a week later; the sisters judged her too noisy.
Anh was 8 when she and her family escaped Vietnam in the midst of the Communist takeover in 1975. The first leg of their journey involved a helicopter filled with so many people it could barely take off. That was only the beginning of decades of struggle.
Her family settled in New Orleans, then Houston, but the adjustments to a new language and culture were so difficult that the child able to acclimate quickly became the third adult in the family.
By the time Reiss attended North Shore High School in northeast Houston, she was working almost full time as a cocktail waitress at Bennigan’s. Still, she graduated No. 2 in her class, with her only B in typing.
When Reiss told her guidance counselor she wanted to attend Rice University, the response was, North Shore kids don’t go to Rice.
But Reiss did. She was accepted to the university on a full scholarship. That’s where she met her future husband, who was both her opposite and her soulmate.
Anh and Josh graduated in May 1989, packed their few possessions and drove to New York. They married in January 1990 and had Alexandra in 1991, the month before Reiss started medical school at the State University of New York. They had their son, Aaron, in 1995, just before she began her residency at New York University.
The family settled in Houston in 1999. Reiss launched her practice, determined that her patients
would reflect the diverse population of Harris County.
“She didn’t want a River Oaks practice,” Josh said at the service for Reiss, at Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Midtown.
As the years passed and Reiss’ reputation grew, she couldn’t go anywhere without running into families she had helped. Their love and affection — and the enormous support she received from the staff at Memorial Hermann Southwest, Josh, the kids and her extended family — kept her going.
Alexandra, 24, works as an event planner at Saks Fifth Avenue. Aaron, 20, is a junior at the University of Missouri. He already has had considerable success as a sports writer.
“Anh was really trying very, very hard to live long enough to see Aaron graduate from college,” said Josh, a prosecutor with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. “But he won a Jim Murray Memorial Foundation Scholarship in October, and there was a banquet in California, and he got a certificate. In her mind, that wasn’t graduation, but it was a more than adequate placeholder.”
The next month, Aaron wrote a commentary comparing his mom, who was just a few weeks from giving up her medical practice, to then University of Missouri head football coach Gary Pinkel, who had to step down from his position to fight non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Aaron quoted Pinkel: “You know, when you get cancer … it’s so numbing. You’re driving around for a week. You glance at yourself in the rearview mirror, and you say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ ”
Aaron also quoted his mother: “Honestly, literally this illness hangs over my head every moment of the day. Even when I’m sleeping, I dream about it.”
The service for Reiss was held Feb. 29. Josh told the several hundred people in attendance — old friends from Rice, patients and staff from Memorial Hermann, members of the district attorney’s office and family — that she hated to leave but wanted to go on her terms.
“She asked me what I thought she should do,” Josh said. “Her options were very limited. I told her it was very difficult for me, but if she wanted to let go I would understand. I would respect her decision. And that’s what happened. She saw the kids one last time, and she let go.”