Christa Pike battling rare cancer attorneys previously warned could complicate her botched execution

Christa Pike is reportedly battling a rare form of cancer that her attorneys warned could complicate her badly botched lethal injection.

Nine months before the 50-year-old convicted killer was slated to be put to death in September, her attorneys cautioned the courts that a rare blood disorder linked to cancer could make her execution painful and dangerous, PEOPLE reported, citing a complaint filed by her legal team on Jan. 8.

Pike’s “platelet count is significantly elevated, likely due to a rare form of blood cancer called myeloproliferative disorder,” her attorneys wrote in the filing.

Her legal team argued her thrombocytosis diagnosis — a condition characterized by elevated platelet levels — could increase her risk of developing severe pulmonary edema, a potentially dangerous buildup of fluid in the lungs during a lethal injection, the outlet reported.

“A pulmonary edema is not simply painful or uncomfortable; it can create a sense of suffocating or drowning that has been likened by experts to the sensation intentionally induced by the practice of waterboarding—an unambiguous form of outright torture,” the filing said.

Pike, who was poised to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years, is the first death row inmate to survive a lethal injection.

She remains locked up in isolation after spending days unconscious and in critical condition in the hospital surviving two doses of pentobarbital allegedly administered with at least 10 needles during the botched execution.

Her planned execution, which was slated for Sept. 30, violated the First, Eighth and Fourteenth amendments, the complaint argued – noting that a lethal injection would be “very likely to result in unnecessary and superadded pain and suffering, terror and disgrace.”

The cancer is not immediately fatal and is often manageable as a chronic condition for years or decades — but it can become life-threatening if they cause major blood clots or progress into acute leukemia, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

The convicted murderer returned to the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center 10 days later, where she’s been in solitary confinement, “largely isolated in the prison’s medical ward, away from other people and the human connections that mean so much to me,” Pike said in a statement released Friday.