Help Kevin Fight Cancer

Hi, I'm Jamie and I'm fundraising to help Kevin fight her cancer. Yes, Kevin is a girl! If you've seen the movie Up you know where she got her name.

 

Aside from being a girl, Kevin is special in a lot of ways. She originally lived in my small outdoor colony of community cats for about a year. I don't know where she lived before she showed up at my house in April 2020.

 

In May 2021 she developed some health problems causing her to lose weight and have very heavy, labored breathing. It took me a few weeks to catch her - she was too smart to go into any of my traps - but I was finally able to bring her indoors in June.

 

At her first vet visit she was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism and tapeworms. Then, after a month of treating her thyroid disease, she was diagnosed with stage 3 kidney disease and hypertension (high blood pressure). The addition of kidney disease and hypertension was not at all surprising because of the relationship between the thyroid, kidneys, and blood pressure. But if that weren't enough, she also had her first dental exam and ended up having 3 teeth removed. Kevin had some suspicious swelling in her gums, so we did a biopsy to check for cancer during her dental. Instead of cancer she got a diagnosis of Stomatitis (an autoimmune disease affecting the mouth). So a month after her first dental cleaning she went back in to have all her teeth removed to treat the stomatitis since it wasn't responding to medication.

 

Skip ahead to January 2022 and Kevin was having a lot of mucus draining from one nostril. This wasn't actually a new problem for her, she'd had it even before I brought her indoors. But with all her other medical treatments she'd spent a lot of time on antibiotics and every time she took them the antibiotics reduced the mucus flow from her nose.

 

Taking some initiative, I skipped a lot of smaller diagnostic tests and had Kevin scheduled for a CT scan and then a rhinoscopy (camera up the nose) and biopsy of a lump in her leaky nostril. Her results came back in mid-February as nasal Adenocarcinoma.

 

Kevin has just met with her oncologist and we have a treatment plan set up. She's going to go through targeted radiation therapy to try and knock down the size of her tumor or possibly put her cancer into remission. If she can handle the treatment emotionally (Kevin is a sensitive girl) she will have 10 radiation treatments. But if they're too hard on her we will stop treatments sooner.

 

Kevin's cancer costs so far are:

$1662.32 (CT scan with internal medicine vet)

$2838.79 (rhinoscopy and biopsy)

$120.00 (oncologist consult)

 

Her upcoming costs are:

$1517.00 - $1823.00 (estimate range for repeat CT scan, needed prior to radiation treatments)

$4970.00 - $5445.00 (estimate range for the full set of 10 radiation treatments)

 

Ordinarily, I wouldn't need help in paying for the cost of treatment. But Kevin's health issues have overlapped with paying for treatment for my cat Oliver who also had an extremely rare cancer. His story is at https://www.gofundme.com/f/oliver-fights-rare-cancer

 

You can follow Kevin and my other geriatric kitties on IG at https://www.instagram.com/houle_boule/ if you're interested. You'll also get some random posts about succulents or celebrating the infrequent rain we receive in the desert.

 

You can view Kevin's invoices and treatment estimates at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1v084nHQt9rfJs6VVhCb6uufATTdlse6H?usp=sharing