Cathy Battle May 2024 Update

Blog 5/7/2024 – PET Scans, Covid, UTI and Bone infection… and finally a little good news.    

You can’t make this stuff up.

After defeating MRSA, getting rid of the PICC line, completing another round of radiation, Cathy finally got back on schedule and restarted Chemotherapy.

However, in the second week of chemo, Cathy began running another fever and was sent from the Cancer center to the ER, turns out she was positive for covid and a UTI.

This was a shocker to us, mostly because we had been monitoring temperature very closely since MRSA… believe it or not the morning temp that day was normal. In the span of 4 hours it changed.

Anyway, this fun little event took us off schedule for a couple more weeks to run the covid protocol, get over the UTI etc.  We have done that. Next page please….

Two weeks ago, Cathy had a PET scan. PET scan showed there was cancer in bones we were not aware of.  We were aware of the 2 tumors on the backbone, and the right femur and the left rib. We were not aware of the clavicle, pubic bone, sacrum, both upper arm bones and the proximal femora (hips), additionally the PET showed what appeared to be a bone infection in the tail bone.

Cathy’s PET was on a Tuesday, and by Thursday the clinical notes were posted to the portal…. Now I am grateful for this Covenant portal – you can see all your stuff whenever you want. The bad part of this pet scan was the Oncologist appointment was not until the following week… So – Cathy and I spent a week reading and rereading the results and creating our own narrative. Not ideal.

The following Monday Cathy saw Dr Rogers and got the official read out. Two points were made about the newly detected cancer. First, we don’t know that the cancer was not in those bones before since this is the first PET scan, and you have missed some chemotherapy. If you miss chemo, the disease will progress. Your goal is to stay healthy enough to participate in chemotherapy so we can fight the systematic disease. Second – the bone infection is a serious matter and must be addressed by an Infectious disease Doctor so we can make sure we kill it. “Bone infections can send you to heaven with a jet pack on” A funny quip by the doc, but not really.

So, a few days later and its off to UT Knoxville Infectious Disease doctor. There was no time wasted here – Seen by the doc and prescribed a long-term antibiotic in the UT infusion center in the next building. This whole trip lasted just 2 hours. Accolades to the nurses in the infusion center – kind, compassionate and timely.

Last week Cathy started the next round of chemo and as part of that they ran some periodic blood work to measure the progress on the Myeloma – Dr Roger called me on Friday and reported that the marker they use to measure the Myeloma progress is improved - Immunoglobin A is reduced by 50% since the past check – this is a good report and means that the chemotherapy is working. This bit of good news was well received by Cathy, she needed it – the week had been tough.

So, we go into this week with a positive attitude – made even stronger yesterday by a tiny but important development in Cathy’s paralysis – Cathy voluntarily moved her feet ever so slightly yesterday. Tiny movement but exciting. We celebrate this and will try to build on it with her therapies going forward. Yeah !

Thank you for your continued support

Kevin and Cathy

Land Basket Farm

www.landbasketfarm@gmail.com

423.202.4924