For those of you who don't know our peregrine kate, I can tell you she is a lovely and wise Kossack, mother of two much-loved daughters (26 and 14), bride of one year to our gifted ProvokingMeaning, a hopeless pootie person, and a resident of Ann Arbor. Good people. Life was busy and full of promise for Kate until a terrible day in January when she was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. Any hopes she and her family had of this being contained were dashed on February 22 when her surgeon opened her up and found the cancer was spreading, as Kate described in this July diary.
Sara R immediately offered a community quilt, collecting comments here, here, here, and here. We all shared Kate's hope that six rounds of chemotherapy would cure her of this terrible disease.
Please follow me over the squiggle for news Kate has asked me to share with the community.
Dear Nurse Kelley,
Yesterday I received the most wonderful gift in the mail: my DKos quilt. It is exquisitely beautiful, not only for the design but even more importantly for the words and emotions it carries.
I spoke on the phone with Sara at length last night, marveling over the fabrics and the designs. She and Ann do superb work.
The arrival of the quilt yesterday was very well timed. I had a CT scan done Tuesday to check out how I had responded, before heading into radiation; understandably, I was anxious about the results. Today I heard bad news from my gynecological oncologist. The 6 chemo treatments I just finished were not very effective. I now show lung nodules, and some enlarged lymph nodes higher in my abdomen. As I understand it, these were present to some extent in March, right after my surgery and before my chemo, but at the time my doctor called them "not concerning." Now, since they didn't shrink or disappear, they are. She said my staging hasn't changed, it's just a "persistent" Stage IIIC.
The next treatment my gyn-onc recommends is Megace, plus (when I asked) some serious anti-oxidant diet and supplements. I was holding off on the anti-oxidants since they basically counteract the chemo. Well, now there's no reason to do that.
Of course I have already spoken with my husband and daughters, who are all upset (though my husband says he isn't scared, just resolute), and texted my sister, and emailed several of my close friends, including my cancer support group friends. So I'm not terribly out on a limb here. Still, I guess I just wanted to let someone on DKos know what was going on.
For now, I think I am going to wrap myself in my quilt and try not to despair. I am not ready to give up. But the idea that all of a sudden things have shifted from a "cure" to a "palliative" situation is more than I can handle. I hope that I am overreacting.
Thanks for all you do, NK. I am sorry to be adding to your burden--and if you already have too much to attend to, I understand. I would ... be very grateful to you for spreading the word. My only request is to make sure that you tell everyone how much I cherish my quilt. I don't doubt that it is life-saving. I plan to work it for all it is worth.
xo Kate
Please keep Kate and her family in your thoughts this Labor Day weekend, along with the many other Kossacks who are facing illness or unemployment or poverty or isolation. While Mrs. Palin would define the four horsemen of the Apocalypse differently, I prefer my terms: Illness. Unemployment. Poverty. Isolation. Our collective shame as a country is that one rarely occurs without the others tagging along.
Remember this, Kate ~ and all Kossacks who are sick or alone or afraid this weekend: