Mom’s cancer was worse in the past. It was eating her alive before she started retaking cancer drugs. She lost something like 50 pounds in less than a month. The cancer meds stopped that. They may not have been able to halt the cancer totally while at half strength, but they did help her body stabilize the situation. The swelling in her legs has gone down again, and she can read and pay attention to TV shows again. The pain is gone. In every way that matters, her symptoms are better today than they were a couple months ago. But the cancer has still been spreading. That is why we have returned the cancer meds to full strength. We know they CAN kill the cancer. Hopefully they will. The problem is that they can hurt her heart. So she is taking meds to strengthen her heart. Please pray that her heart can handle the strength of the drugs required to kill the cancer.
Mom’s cancer was beaten back in the brain, but the definitive tests of yesterday showed us that it has continued to grow in her body. After a brief meeting with her doctor, and after looking at multiple options for the road ahead, we decided that the best route forward was to return her cancer meds to full dosage and hope they will fight off the cancer again as they did before. The cancer will almost certainly kill Mom in time. But if it responds to these drugs as it did last time at this dosage, and if Mom’s heart can handle the meds, she could live for years into the future. If it does not respond, or if her heart has problems with the meds, years are no longer in the foreseeable future.
We are going to the Mayo Clinic today. Mom has a blood test to see how she is handling the drugs. She has a pet scan, where they fill her full of sugar and check to see what’s eating the sugar. If there is anything really hungry, it is probably cancer. And they are testing her heart to see how it is tolerating the drugs. These will be definitive tests on how the treatments are working. Please pray for mom.
I met Kathleen Reynolds at Alpha Centauri, after we Cowboys got approval to poach from other units to make good our combat losses. She volunteered to join us, for reasons she did not share at the time, and proceeded to pass every test we gave her. Including showing me a thing or two about starfighter combat. It was one of the most enjoyable fighter duels I’ve ever engaged in. She showed me moves I didn’t know existed, and I still maintain I could have beaten her, but Charles called it after an hour of me chasing her score. She was fun to spar with, both with weapons and words, and it absolutely did not feel like an hour had gone by. I wanted her on my team so bad after that, and I guess she felt the same about me.
The American military tested their newest supersoldier serum on the Spittin’ Kittens after The War began. Kathleen Reynolds led them out on numerous combat operations over the next few months, and they soon proved that they could fight nearly as good as her. Their long campaign culminated in the tumultuous Battle of Fort Wichita, when she personally shot down six Shang fighters and organized one of the many flanking actions that eventually forced the Shang to retreat before they could destroy the orbital fort. That earned the Kittens a complete set of priority tech upgrades from the Peloran fleet, which Katy quickly took advantage of. She turned the Kittens into even more of a nuisance to both the Shang and the Chinese fleets from Earth to Alpha Centauri in the months that followed.