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.

Thursday, August 14, 2003

Thursday, August 14, 2003 8:10 PM CDT

Susan here..

Well - Nathan is home. He didn't run a fever all night and so after getting red blood cells today he came home around 4:30. We are so glad he didn't have to stay for three days.

He did really well in the hospital. The Child Life specialist did several art activities with him and another volunteer brought him books and toys from the playroom and read to him while we were eating lunch.

After we got home he was OK until he had a very painful bowel movement and then he wanted to go straight to bed and this was around 5:30 so we'll see how tonight goes.

Nathan's doctor did not get to look at his bone marrow samples this morning due to having a very sick patient in ICU so he will try again tomorrow morning. We are not holding our breath though.

Nathan is going in at 11:00 to have a dose of antibiotics and just kind of assess him for the weekend.

Oh - I almost forgot Nathan's highlight of the day. All day we watched construction equipment out his window. There was a backhoe hauling dirt around and a front end loader loading dirt into a dump truck. Later in the afternoon a security guard showed up and said Nathan's nurse had told him how excited he was about the trucks and he had talked to the foreman about letting Nathan go see the vehicles. It worked out that he was in between infusions so he was hooked off of his IV and went down to see the trucks. He was a little overwhelmed and afraid to sit in them, but he finally did sit in the backhoe with Luke. He was also excited to stand next to the shovel and tires of the front end loader because it was so much bigger than him. He really thought it was cool. They let him keep his hard hat too. Unfortunately there are no pictures. An attempt was made to take a polaroid but it failed. A good friend of mine has been working to set up a construction truck visit for Nathan and we were initially going to do it today so he will probably get another chance when he is feeling better.

We were very pleased with Nathan's care at Memorial Hospital once again. The nurses all adore him. When he showed up last night they were all so happy to see him. Several of them work in the clinic occassionally and others remember him from previous visits. We feel lucky to have such caring nurses tending to him.

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