Kate Brees

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My story is about the strength and courage of my beautiful wife Kate.  She truly is my best friend, my soul mate, my rock I turn to for support.  I would do anything for her.   Kate is a great mother/step mother to 5 great kids (and 2 dogs, cat, few fish).   Kate is also a NICU nurse at Waukesha Memorial Hospital and I can not express enough how much she loves being a nurse & working with those babies.   She also recently completed a bucket list item running a 1/2 marathon (in the cold/freezing rain/snow) on December 12, 2016 which she trained hard to do (literally went from not being a runner to a 1/2 marathon in 12 weeks).   How this wonderful woman allowed me to convince her to marry me, I have no idea!!!  All I can say is that I am literally the luckiest man in the word.

But.... how did we end up here, having a story on CaringBridge website.     I will give the short version of how we ended up with a story.    My beautiful wife had been feeling ill for a week or so.   Didn't thing much of it as flu season, stuff going around, etc.    But Kate really was exhausted beyond her normal "night shifter" typical exhaustion.    Few days go by, but Kate, always a trooper with work, goes to work on Friday because the babies need her and she loves her job working with the babies.    She makes it through her shift, comes home in the morning and takes her normal nap.  She gets up and lets me know she is still not feeling well and wants to drive herself to Urgent Care (right, I am for sure going with!!).

We go to Urgent Care, the doc examines her and notes we better to an ER as they believed Kate may have a perforated ulcer.   OK....     We then go to Waukesha Memorial Hospital ER to get examined, scans completed, blood work drawn, etc...    They say they are having a hard time putting together the pieces with the way the blood work was looking,  her symptoms, it was confusing so until they would figure it out, she would need to be admitted.  OK..  no problem.. I want her to get healthy...      We get moved to the 5th floor, in our assigned room for like 3 minutes and told we were just reassigned to the ICU....  What the heck???   Noted there were concerns based off the blood sample and low cell counts....

Go to the ICU.   Meet with the doctor who was on-call who had already made some consult calls.   The consensus was the sample had strong traits my wife has some sort of Leukemia.  What???  Huh???  I mean how does one digest even the possibility that 7 hour earlier we were at Urgent Care for what we thought we might get some nausea medication to having Leukemia.  C'mon...

We spent 2 nights at the ICU in Waukesha with great staff helping us as best they could, doctors doing what they could but eventually it was concluded Kate's case was getting pretty complicated and the best place for her would be to continue her care at Froedtert Hospital CFAC (Center for Advanced Care).  Wow...  It's overload at this point.   As a husband, you don't ever want to see your wife sick.    Get news like this about your wife, that she has a case complex enough it warrants help from the experts at Froedtert Hospital, it will bring down the strongest of people for a few minutes with that news.....

So...  We are currently at Froedtert Hospital CFAC continuing treatment for my beautiful wife.   We do know what battle is officially we are now fighting,  We are fighting (and going to kick it's butt by the way) "AML", Acute Myeloid Leukemia.   We officially plan to start this battle to eradicate this disease tomorrow with the beginning of round one of the treatment plan set forth by the team of experts here at Froedtert Hospital.    And we ARE going to win this battle... especially when I have a wife as tough as mine...  

Positive thoughts, prayers, anything you believe might send good vibes over to my wife is greatly appreciated.   She has spent her life being a nurse helping people through their sicknesses, injuries, helping those little fragile NICU babies fight their battles, now my wife is in quite the fight herself.    and again.. she will WIN....   and I will conclude with how Dr Michaels (the lead in Kate's case) ended our conversation when discussing the treatment plan, she ended it with "Let's eradicate this disease from your body...  Let's beat the fuck out of this Leukemia"....   and we will....