Turns out, when the Doctor walked into the room at the start of round 4 and said, “Well, are you ready to start the REAL chemo?” he wasn’t lying. It’s been a rough week to say the least. Cathy went into the hospital for round 5 last Thursday. On Friday night she had a severe reaction to one of the drugs and spiked a 104.6 degree fever. 12 hours and a lot of Tylenol and Benadryl later, her fever was reduced, but they kept her an extra day to make sure everything was under control. On Sunday, the cumulative effect of the chemo depleted her blood counts so they gave her a blood transfusion to prop up those numbers. Luckily, it worked! She went home Sunday night to rest, but not comfortably.

Monday her blood work showed a drop in Potassium and Magnesium (another side effect of the drugs), so she was hooked up to a drip of what I can only imagine were liquified bananas for a few hours. Tuesday, the numbers weren’t much better, so another trip to the doctor and more bananas for Cathy. Thankfully, this worked too, and those numbers are back to normal and Cathy is feeling much better! The Doctor promised to remove the problem drug the next time around, so hopefully history won’t repeat itself.

Luckily, Cathy’s sister Christy was visiting this week, which was an incredible blessing given everything that went down. Everyone thank Christy! If you’ve never met her, besides having alliterative names, Cathy and Christy also very much look like sisters. Here she is in Bitmoji format:

Told you so.

I was in New York for work on Tuesday, and I happened to walk by a statue that seemed to perfectly summarize this week:

Not positive, but I’m pretty sure this installation is called, “Cathy Laatsch’s Will.”

Cathy continues to amaze in facing this battle head-on with her head held high. The other day she even criticized me for how I was loading the dishwasher, which was great because I knew in that moment that she was beginning to feel better 🙂

So, what’s next? Well, we have a consultation with Loyola University Medical Center on Monday. After 6 rounds of chemo, the doctor has recommended undergoing what is called an Autologous Stem Cell Transplant. Which is a sciency term for collecting your own stem cells, freezing them, undergoing extremely high dose therapy, and then re-injecting those stem cells to replace all the damaged ones. I guarantee whoever invented this process definitely won a Science Fair as a kid. This is all done over a long hospital stay, and while serious, it has been the plan all along and is recommended as the best final step in first line treatment. More to come after the appointment on Monday, but for now we’re going to go enjoy this summer weather!