Things don’t always go perfectly to plan (see also: my aspirations to be a doctor) and this week we hit a few bumps in the road. The initial drug, Venetoclax, that Cathy was hospitalized to ramp up on, proved ineffective in reducing her disease burden (more like Ve-not-doing-very-much-clax, am I right??). Luckily, plans had been made should this be the case and the doctors decided it was time to:

Cathy had her T-Cells harvested on Friday – well before the autumn festival – which were then shipped off to a lab where they will be enhanced to seek out a specific protein on her cancer. While we await this sci-fi sounding procedure, more aggressive chemotherapy was ordered. You know it’s serous stuff when a nurse has to put on full protective gear just to handle the IV bag, and then proceeds to immediately inject the contents of said bag into Cathy’s veins. And boy, were the effects brutal. Sunday, Cathy came down with a very high fever that couldn’t be suppressed by Tylenol or any pain relievers. A bunch of tests were run to rule out infections (all was clear), and eventually a steroid was given which calmed everything down. I could tell she was on the mend when she started giving her nurse cleaning tips. The chemo was paused until this was all sorted out. They started it back up again today, infusing at a slower rate and giving her steroids up front to hopefully knock down the brutal side effects. She’ll have two infusions of this drug and if she can cross the chasm without any more trouble there’s a chance we could bust out of here tomorrow. Fingers crossed for a boring day!