Look in the dictionary under the definition of resilience and you’ll find a picture of Katelyn Murray.
A Red Flag
I met Kate only days after she began a journey through leukemia in February 2016. She had just turned 12. Kate beat leukemia, rang her end of treatment bell, and carried on with her young life. A few months short of five years after her leukemia journey ended, Kate received some unexpected news. 
In 2022 she was preparing to embark on a short-term missions trip with Youth With a Mission (YWAM). A routine medical returned a red flag on her white cell count. The Edmonton Stollery Children’s Hospital oncology team did a bone marrow biopsy and found Kate’s white blood cells were 35% cancerous. She was days from turning 19-years-old, so she was transferred into the adult-health-care system and given chemotherapy pills to take from home each day.
She needed a donor for a bone marrow transplant to save her life. Her family members were not a match.
Bone Marrow Donors and Unicorns
Finding a non-related, 10-out-of-10 donor has similarities to finding a unicorn. However, within a few months, a unicorn was found for Kate. That succinct sentence makes the process sound so simple. It was anything but.
Kate was admitted into the Foothills Hospital in Calgary on March 22nd.
On March 31, 2023, Kate had her bone marrow transplant.
Kate and her mom agreed to share her story so that REVwords readers could appreciate all that patients like Kate go through in a transplant journey. The skill and compassion of health care professionals and the grace of God and your prayers are appreciated. They are vital to her healthy future.
Transplant
The transplant team anticipated her being in hospital for 3 to 4 weeks while her immune system restarts using the donor cells. They say the first few weeks are tough, as her fast-growing cells (like hair, nails, and GI tract) are chemo’d.
Kate had chest pain and needed oxygen on the April 2nd weekend. She has constant nausea.
She received medications at 8am and 8pm each day that took a couple of hours to run through the IV. After those doses, she was usually sick for a number of hours.
Her immune system was knocked-out by the high-dose chemo and radiation that she had prior to the transplant. The transplanted immune system was suppressed by low-doses of chemo to prevent rejection. As she didn’t have an immune system, she was on preventative antibiotics.
Normal
At that phase in treatment, it was “normal” for Kate to have mouth and throat sores, so it hurt for her to swallow. At one point they expected the ulceration of her whole GI tract to get much worse.
The transplant team described her first week as a period of time “one just has to get through”. The prayer was that the new stem cells would “engraft”, the bone marrow starts producing blood cells on its own, the new immune system doesn’t attack Kate’s organs, and her white blood cell count would come up so her body aould heal the chemo ulcers.
During her second week post-transplant, Kate’s four IV pumps were running full-time. Her mouth throat, and stomach had her on a liquid diet, and she hadn’t been able to swallow many pills. On the weekend of April 16th, she had a huge turnaround; her donor bone marrow has started producing cells on its own.
Medications
In the first month after the transplant, Kate’s immune system was in its infancy. As she grew white blood cells, her mouth and throat were healing. Her doctors were giving her more and more of her medication’s in pill form, rather than IV. She had a lot of medication:
Antibiotics
Antirejection
Antifungals
Anti-nauseas
Liver-protecting pills
Blood-thinner injections
Magnesium
Potassium
The more she could take by mouth, the fewer hours of IV medications she needed, and the more she could get out of bed and move around; that led to a cycle of health improvement. She endured having to vomit often and spent most of her time in her hospital bed.
Progress
The transplant team was happy with Kate’s progress. They told us it takes a long time to gain strength after full body radiation. They watched carefully for any signs of Graft Versus Host disease. When Kate’s eyes were dry and red, they debated possible GVH. Each little rash was investigated for GVH. They also monitored her for any signs of her previous childhood illnesses flaring-up while she still had little immune/fighting abilities. For months she had to isolate to stay away from exposure to viruses and pray her new immune system merged well with her body.
The Journey Continues
We visited Kate and her mum in Calgary before her transplant and again in June 2023. Post-transplant has been a challenging time in so many ways. Emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Kate was limited in her connections with non-family members and her compromised immune system put her at risk for any travel.
Anyone with a family member going through a health crisis like Kate, knows that when one suffers, all suffer.
This was not the life Kate envisioned when she was 12.
Please share this post with people in your life going through challenging health journeys and join the conversation below. Thank you.
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