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.

Friday, May 30, 2003

Friday, May 30, 2003 5:25 PM CDT

Susan here..

Nathan went to the clinic this morning and his immunity is lower but not in the low spot yet. His platelets were quite low and his red blood cells were low too. He will have a red blood cell transfusion on Monday. He had a platelet transfusion later in the morning today. Unfortunately when he was done I got him to the car and noticed he was breaking out in hives so I took him right back up to the clinic and they gave him benedryl and steroids. We were there another 2 hours for him to get over it. Since he had an allergic reaction to the platelets today they will have to premedicate him always in the future to make sure it doesn't happen again.

We talked with the nurse practitioner about the stem cell harvest (I incorrectly called it a rescue yesterday - that is the part when they give it back to him - this is the part where they remove the stem cells). She told us that the other doctor's plan for Nathan was not all that different (as Nathan' DR had told us) and that it will be an outpatient procedure (also not what we were previously told) I got pretty frustrated about this and also the fact that we wouldn't meet the other doctor until the day before the harvest and so we will meet with him on thursday in Denver to be able to get an authoritative answer to all our questions. So anyway - it is good news that he won't have to stay in the hospital for it and also they think they will most likely be able to use his central line to get the stem cells instead of putting a different temporary catheter in him.

The hives episode was kind of hard on him, but other than that he has had a prety good day. In between our initial visit to the clinic and going back to get the platelets we went to a nearby park and he played a little. He is eating fairly well and we can take him off the supplemental nutrition during the day. Hopefully he will fell well enough this weekend to play outside a little and have some fun. We will be keeping him home since his immunity ought to be low by then.

Have a good weekend. We may or may not update in the next few days.

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