Welcome to Nathan's Cancer Journey

This blog is a reposting of Nathan's Caringbridge page which we updated throughout his battle with Neuroblastoma.

Nathan was born on June 16, 2000, diagnosed with Stage IV Neuroblastoma on April 1, 2003 and died on July 29, 2007.

I have posted the journal here to make it easier to look up by date and also to be able to easily add pictures to the journal entries.

Some of the pictures go along with the text, but many of the pictures you will see were pictures taken on the same date the journal was added, even if the pictures have nothing to do with the text. In the future I may add additional journal entries to go along with pictures to add more explanation/memories.

I am just getting started posting the years of entries and so this will be incomplete for some time. I hope to eventually also post the guestbook entries by date as a comment on the post.

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Tuesday, April 29, 2003 1:10 PM CDT

Luke here.

Not much to report really. Nathan was in for his counts and an exam yesterday. All was good. He has gained weight and his counts were up. His immune system counts were very high and that is great. His hemoglobin was good, not great, but good enough that he didn't need a red blood cell transfusion. His platelets are up, but not enough to begin chemotherapy, so we are a little uncertain about what the rest of the week holds. Tomorrow we will go in to get his counts. If his platelets are up enough, he will have a bone marrow aspiration and then full day of chemo. If his platelets aren't up, then the three day course of chemo can't start until Monday and we aren't sure about whether or not he would get the aspiration or if that would wait until Monday too. We are a little torn on this. Since Friday he has been doing great, eating well

From April 2003
and feeling better than he has since before getting the diagnosis. He is doing well enough right now to be pretty much off of most of the meds he was taking and not tied to the nutritional supplement. A few more days of feeling good might go a long way for him. On the other hand, we do want to stay on "schedule" with treatment as much as we can. At least the decision will be made for us. If the counts are up, we start. If not, we wait and enjoy another good weekend.

Special thanks to Josh and Jae for visiting. What a great weekend it was for them to be here. Nathan was feeling well and excited about the company and Julia really had a great time too.

Wednesday, April 30, 2003 7:50 PM CDT

Susan here -

Today I went in with Nathan to see if his counts were high enough to start chemo and they were borderline but good enough and so we began. His bone marrow biopsy is tomorrow. Luke will be going in with him tomorrow because three 8 hour days in a row would rob me of my sanity. Julia will be getting her MMR vaccine tomorrow - we have been waiting to do it when Nathan's immunity was fine.

He had a pretty good day but refused to nap and by the end of the day he had had enough. He also ate and ate and ate. He has been eating constantly ever since he started up again. It is good, but I was concerned with him making himself sick!

I imagine there is more to say but I am completely drained from a long day. I'll fill in anything missing tomorrow.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)