Susan here...
We are back from Denver. We ended up staying over last night so we couldn't update.
Tuesday morning we left for Denver at 6:00 am and got to the hospital by 7:15 even though we were told to expect a 2 hour drive. At 8 we went to the blood center and they had to do all his labs. He got started on the machine at about 9:30. Midway through they tested to see how many stem cells they had collected so far. It was a good collection and so they asked us if we wanted to keep on going until 6:00 pm to maximize the amount we could get. We agreed and so we decided to stay in Denver for the night. Nathan was so good. He was in the bed attached to the machine from 8am to 6pm and didn't fuss the whole time. He had a 2 hour nap in the afternoon. I ran out to Target to get us some things to stay over. They collected 6.4 million stem cells on Tuesday with a goal of 8-10 million. Today we started around 8:00 and were done at 1:30. They estimate a total collection of about 9 million. We will know tomorrow what the actual count was. He will need only about 5 million for the stem cell transplant but they like to have extra for future transplants or supplements if needed.
He was very good today as well. We were so impressed by him.
He won't go back to the clinic until he starts chemo on Monday but he may have a cat scan of his sinus area on Friday. His nose has been running since diagnosis and we can't figure out why. He also has some swelling and slight briusing of his right eye which is something he had at diagnosis and so we are concerned about that. We already know he has cancer in those bones around his eye but it really should be receding now.
We will celebrate his birthday on Saturday. We don't know exactly what we are doing. We may have a few of his friends over but try to keep it fairly small.
The people we worked with at the blood donor center at Denver Children's Hospital were great. We have been so lucky with Nathan's doctors and nurses.
We'll update tomorrow.
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