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, September 26, 2003 – 2nd post

Friday, September 26, 2003 9:30 PM CDT

Luke here...Nathan had a pretty good day considering. Check in on past posts for the history and last night's problems. Today he was himself. He is way tired right now. His counts are bottoming out. He had some immune system this morning, but will have little or none tomorrow. His platelets plummeted today so he'll begin needing transfusions for those tomorrow. His mouth sores are bad. His cheeks are swollen and he isn't really swallowing much. He is drooling a lot and all he had to eat today was a few bites of cereal and half a cup of milk. His oral medicines hurt him. Now saying all of that, it was a much better day than yesterday. He was never hysterical. He slept a lot. I think he feels better when sleeping. I know I like to sleep when I feel shitty and I can't even fathom how bad he must feel. We are also giving him morphine whenever he needs it for the pain, so that knocks him out a little too. When he was awake, he played and watched tv and did normal things, just with a lot less energy. He feels bad, but I feel very positive about the day compared to yesterday.

The real bad news of the day is that Susan is sick with a stomach flu and can't be with Nathan at all. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I don't get it. She did feel better earlier, but is feeling very ill tonight.

And now for a cute Nathan story. I think everyone could use one of those right about now. Two nights ago after we left Nathan didn't really want to go to sleep. He wasn't fussy, just not sleepy. His nurse came in and found him lying flat on his back on the bed with his vomit bin covering his head while singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". That is our boy.

Goodnight.

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