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.

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Wednesday, September 17, 2003 10:41 PM CDT

Luke here...I'm beat, so I'll miss a lot and probably seem a little incoherent. The bottom line is that it was a pretty good day, although a very long one. Where to start? Nathan had a good night last night. He went to bed early and slept very well in the room in the apartment. He got a good 12 hours sleep. We got to the hospital and into the unit at around 8:30 am. Not much happened today. They want the patient checked in to get familiar with the unit. We will be talking a lot about the day we are on. The day he receives his stem cell infusion is day 0. Days prior to that are negative numbered days. Today was day -8. Tomorrow is day -7 and his chemo begins. Today mostly consisted of answering a lot of questions, getting to know the staff, getting measured, weighed, and etc. We could have gotten a pass to leave the unit since his chemo hasn't started, but since he will be forced to stay on the unit once things start, we didn't want to set the precedent that he was allowed to leave, so we stayed in.

I'm going to wrap things up. I'm fading fast. We were worried about leaving him alone tonight. We prepped him all day and he was upset about it when we talked, but when the time came he was more upset about putting away his toys than he was about us leaving. The nurse was reading him a book when we left and he didn't raise a fit. Hopefully this will go well. Parents are encouraged not to sleep over and there is only a recliner if we did. We will stay on nights he is really sick, but most nights we will be coming back to our apartment, which is very nice and comfortable.

We left his address and room number information back at the hospital. Sometime tomorrow we'll try and post that information.

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