In August last year, Casey Cattie began to wake up in the morning soaked in sweat.
“It wasn’t hot for me. It was really cold for me because I was a fan,” says Cattie from Philadelphia 30 years. “It was a completely soaked night sweating.”
She was wearing a Oura ring she gave to her by a friend, and since the beginning of the Nightsweats, she often informed that she “showcases singing about a big illness.” Cattie saw several doctors to get to the bottom of her body changes, but no one could find a reason.
Then, last spring, Cattie suffered a medical situation while traveling in Iceland, where doctors said they suspected they were suffering from cancer.
April She was diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It seemed that only her Oura ring noticed something wrong.
“I saw all these fever, but nothing more,” she says. “I had all these obscure symptoms. And I saw my primary care provider, I saw a doctor, got colonoscopy and endoscopy to check for any type of internal bleeding – all that was negative.”
Night sweating and fever
At the end of last summer, Cattie was constantly awakening with night sweats.
“They gradually deteriorated,” she says. “I didn’t think much about it, which is really sad to say.”
Children’s nurse diminished her symptoms, “Because ((medicine) you see so many crazy things every day that you could never think you would happen.”
At that time, she wore an Oura ring and Apple Watch to track her menstrual cycle and compare the data. The ring raised the Cattie curve temperature.
“If your temperature is so high in your normal, they just think you are sick,” she says. “I ignored it for a few months because I (I thought), ‘Maybe it’s just where I’m in my cycle.” I was thinking about every excuse for the book why it couldn’t be accurate. “
After a few months of experienced night sweats and fever, Casey Cattie visited several doctors to understand what is happening to her health. It still took months before she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. (Courtesy of Casey Cattie)
A couple of months later, Cattie was concerned and held meetings with various doctors to understand why she had night sweat and fever.
“My doctors did all the tests,” she says. “My blood work was completely normal, except that I was lacking in iron.
She even met with a hematologist’s oncologist to remove cancer.
“She said she had very little suspicion that I was a malignant tumor,” recalls Cattie. “All my blood work was almost normal.”
The doctor also noted that Cattie had no tangible lymph nodes, which may be a sign of cancer (although this is often a sign of viral infections).
Although Cattie still felt something wrong, doctors found no reason for her fever, so she continued her life. While celebrating her 30th birthday, she planned a trip to Iceland and felt “excited to explore a new country.”
But “Everything was alienated from Get-go,” she remembers. “I walked around Reykjavik, the city of the Icelandic capital, with my friend, and looked at him and I was,” God, what’s height here? I feel I can’t breathe. “
Her friend replied that they were “literally at sea level.” Cattie remembers wondering if she had the flu and so she had a hard time breathing. On the trip, she continued to fight for walking and gradually felt so bad that she had lost her appetite. In the end, Cattie was so weak.
“I couldn’t even get to the restaurant nearby without stopping three or four times to breathe,” she says.
Cattie delayed her doctor in Iceland because she was concerned with the cost. But the day before leaving, she visited the emergency department because she was worried that she would not be able to fly home because of breathing breathing. Doctors diagnosed her with a “huge pleura episode”, which occurs when fluid pools around the lungs, making it difficult to breathe.
“I had a gallon of liquid in the chest,” says Cattie. “I drowned inside a week until my diagnosis.”
In the ambulance department, doctors drained the liquid from her chest so she could fly home. They also ordered CT scans and said Cattie “They think it’s cancer” because they found enlarged lymph nodes. They recommended her to make a lymph node biopsy and PET scan to make the final diagnosis.
A few days after she returned home, her breathing turned back again because her chest was again filled with liquid. She visited the local emergency department and the doctors acknowledged her.
“They drained me with a chest tube,” says Cattie. “Two days later I had to scan the pet that lit as a Christmas tree. They performed a lymph node biopsy three days later.”
Studies led to a 4 -step diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and it was performed in the first phase of chemotherapy while still in the hospital. After two and a half weeks, she returned home.
Doctors said her lymphoma affected the lymph nodes deep in her chest, making it filled with fluid.
“They were so big,” she says. “This caused irritation in my chest cavity, so my body releases more pleural fluid and continued to repeat the fluid in my chest.”
A total of Cattie will perform 12 chemotherapy and immunotherapy rounds every two weeks. From 2025 It is more than in the middle of August than in the middle of treatment.
“Every round was different,” she says. “I just don’t have much appetite.”
She also suffered some nerve damage and feels “chronically dehydrated”.
It still wears the Oura ring.
“A few days after treatment, it tells me that I show mild signs of illness, which is really interesting to me (and), because that’s when I feel the worst,” she says.
Hodgkin’s lymphoma
The type of cancer that comes from white blood cells, Hodgkin’s lymphoma often grows in lymph nodes, says the American Cancer Society. This can affect the lymph nodes in the chest, abdomen and pelvis, although it can also occur in the spleen, bone marrow, thyme, gastrointestinal or adenoids and tonsils.
According to Mayo Clinic, fever and night sweats are two common symptoms.
The American Cancer Society says that in 2025 Almost 9,000 people will be diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. These are usually young adults, although it can affect children and older adults. Treatment includes chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation or targeted therapy.
Portables detect the disease
Portable devices such as smart watches and rings are well determined by heartbeat and heart rate variability, but “it depends on the device”, Michael Snyder, Ph.D., Stanford Genomics and Individualized Medicine Center, says today.com.
Nevertheless, portable items can accurately determine the individual’s initial metric displacement, “So, even if the temperature is not completely accurate, you can take a shift perfectly,” adds Snyder, who investigates how portables can be used to find diseases before symptoms begin.
Casey Cattie is more than halfway treatment with Stage 4 Hodgkin Lymphoma. (Courtesy of Casey Cattie)
Synder and his team have conducted research showing that portable items know when people have respiratory viral infections such as Covidid-19 because “heart rate jumps up,” he says. They can even detect the Covidid-19 before the symptoms began, his research has found.
Anecdotal reports indicate that smart watches and rings may also notice atrial fibrillation as the condition causes irregular heartbeat.
Although portable items can accurately follow the heart rate, they may not always determine the cause of change or increase – and can be high, starting from constant stress to marathon running.
“The point is what you tell you that something doesn’t work. It doesn’t always tell you what it is,” says Synder. “You can contextualized this many times. … if you have been driving a marathon for a few days and your heart rate, it is because you have run a marathon.”
If your portable tells about an abnormal body shift, he recommends talking to your doctor.
“If it goes on, you should check it. It’s very similar to the checkpoint of your car’s check,” he says. “If you just blink, you would probably ignore it. But if he would stay for a while, you would probably check your car.”
“Freaking Awesome”
As a child nurse, Cattie works in a hospital with children. She took a holiday because chemotherapy destroyed her immune system and worried about the infection of the disease. In addition, a 12 -hour shift browsing chemotherapy seemed difficult.
Recently, she has been scared and she is happy about how well the treatment works.
“My scans were clear, which is wonderful, given that I had tumors all my lungs all my esophagus. I had them on my spleen,” she says.
As a Cattie, who is also a musician, ponders her experience, it still seems incredible.
“When I think of everything I experience in April, I really can’t believe it happened to me,” she says. “When you say that you have cancer in a foreign country alone, there is a type of trauma that I would not want to do.”
Cattie hopes that people will learn how important it is to speak to their health by hearing her story.
Casey Cattie hopes her story will encourage people to become supporters of their health when something seems wrong. (Courtesy of Casey Cattie)
“I spent eight months with doctors who spent my diagnosis – doctors with 40 years of experience in treating lymphoma and specializing in the type of cancer I have. I trusted them,” she says.
“I don’t want someone to quit on the bus here. Basically, if you feel something wrong, you need to trust that feeling of intestine.”
Amendment (August 6, 2025 8:50): The previous version misunderstood that Cattie had a non -Hodgkin lymphoma. It has Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
This article was originally published today.com.com