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.

Monday, July 7, 2003

Monday, July 7, 2003 5:56 PM CDT

Susan here..

Long day today. We got to the hospital at 7:45 and found out both tests were mistakenly scheduled for tomorrow. The echocardiogram was squeezed in and they rescheduled his cat scan for 2:00 pm. He did well in his echocardiogram. Afterwards we went out for brunch and then to the clinic. His blood counts were low. His platelets were 29 (they need to be 75 to start chemo) and his white clood cell counts were low too. When we were at the clinic on Thursday his counts were higher due to count boosting medication. So basically he was low all weekend and we didn't know it. It does explain his not feeling great though. This isn't a big surprise because after so many rounds of chemo his bone marrow is having a harder time recovering from chemo. So - he won't be starting chemo tomorrow. We will check his counts on Wednesday but aren't very optimistic about them being up by then. We'll check again on Friday and if they are up then we will have to decide whether or not to put him in the hospital so he can start of Friday instead of waiting until Monday.

After the clinic we went back to the hospital and waited for 2 hours for his cat scan. Why they wanted us there at noon I'll never know. We had to give him oral contrast at 1:00. It is 120 ml or white stuff he has to drink. He fussed about it but we coaxed it all down him a little at a time. We were sitting in the waiting room the whole time and so everyone else was subjected to kids TV and Nathan's crying over the contrast. Next time we will hopefully do it at our usual outpatient place which is MUCH better. He did SO GREAT in the cat scan. He layed down and was very still for about 10 minutes while they did it and wasn't even very scared. Luke and I sang to him the whole time. Afterwards we went and got ice cream and then came home and he wanted a grilled cheese sandwich and is doing just fine.

His doctor will likely call tomorrow with the cat scan results. We will of course update the journal when we hear something. His doctor wrote up a prescription for the hospital to put all his cat scans on a CD for us. I may run over and get that tomorrow. I have seen the images from the first two but Luke has not.

So - that is the news for the day.

Susan

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