Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We've created it to keep friends and family updated about Katie's journey. Get started by reading the introduction to our website, My Story.
Visit often to read the latest journal entries and write us a note in our guestbook.
Where to begin...a few months ago Katie experienced pain in her lower back. At first, she and her doctors thought it was a muscle pull or tear, so she was treated accordingly. With no relief after many appointments and experiencing increased pain, she and various doctors decided it would be worthwhile for her to get an MRI scan.
Unfortunately, the MRI scan showed a mass tumor the size of an egg on her T-11 spinal cord, which was pushing the spinal cord out of alignment and causing pressure onto the appropriate nerves. The initial recommendation was a chemotherapy regiment to shrink the mass, radiation and eventually a surgery. Due to the severity of the recommendation and location of the mass, Tom didn't skip a beat and contacted his Mayo cancer team who rocked it out of this world to set us up with the a world renowned neurological surgeon for a meeting the very next day.
On November 19th, Katie and Tom drove down to Rochester, MN and met with that surgeon (Dr. Rose) along with an amazing radiation & chemo team. On November 25th, her PET scan reconfirmed that there were no other masses in the body (outside of the one on the T-11 spinal cord) and her blood work came back normal. This was very positive news to receive during a stressful time!
Based on the data that was collected from these appointments and scans, the consensus was to continue with the original recommendation of starting with chemo at the Mayo . As scheduled, on December 1st Katie went down to the Mayo where the doctors inserted a port for the anticipated chemotherapy.
From that point on (about 10 days), Katie went from tolerable pain that quickly escalated to intolerable, which eventually lead to loss of feeling and control in her legs and feet.
On Sunday morning December 6th, Dr. Rose called to check on Katie's status and when he heard about the pain level and loss of feeling/control, he immediately urged her to go down to Mayo to complete scans and surgery.
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