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.

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Sunday, June 29, 2003 9:14 AM CDT
Luke here...No major news since Susan's post on Thursday. Nathan's spirits have been pretty down in this cycle. As his counts have gotten low he is obviously feeling pretty bad. We are hoping his counts and spirits bounce up pretty soon. The last cycle of chemo was a different set of drugs. The immediate side effects were a little worse with that one, but he didn't get as low as he does with the regular set of medications. We haven't been sleeping much. He is waking a lot in the night and needing attention. He isn't violently ill or anything, but he is very upset until one of us cuddles with him for awhile. The cycle is for him to wake every couple of hours. Last night I gave him IV benadryl at about 2:30am and it knocked him out pretty good until morning. Hopefully once he begins to feel better he won't be waking as much. A teenager in the clinic tried to describe how it felt when one's counts are down. The long and short of it was that she just basically felt all around horrible with aches, fatigue, etc. We think he is just feeling very bad and waking needing comfort. Nathan's platelets are low this weekend too so we are dealing with a lot of nose bleeds. I'm sure he will need at least platelets tomorrow and probably red blood cells sometime early next week too.
We should be getting a bunch of tests done between this and the next cycle. Essentially we will be having the full battery of tests that they did at diagnosis. This will give us a clearer picture of how he is responding to treatment and hopefully will give us an idea of when we may be able to schedule his surgery to remove the primary tumor. These tests will be pretty nerve racking. Once we get things scheduled your continued prayers and positive thoughts for positive results will, as always, be greatly appreciated.
We have been blessed to have my parents here for the past month. I don't know if we could get through this summer without the help and support we are getting from our parents. Soon we will be doing a shift change. Susan's parents just got on the road today and are headed here. My parents will head home and Bill and Carolyn will be here in the Springs for July and August.

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