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 3, 2003

Wednesday, September 3, 2003 10:07 AM CDT

Susan here...

Nathan had a bit of a rough night but is feeling pretty good this morning.

He had to have a urinary catheter and it wasn't working right and had to be replaced. This was very painful and traumatic for him and it took two tries. Around midnight his pain broke through and he was really hurting. They upped his epidural and then Luke spent a few hours holding Nathan's incision since that seemed to make him feel better and he wouldn't let Luke let go. We were both able to stay with him in the ICU and so that was good. We have a computer here with us and so that is how we are updating.

This morning he is sleepy and is having a blood transfusion as he is quite anemic. His doctor have been by but his oncologists haven't spoken to the surgeon and the surgeon doing rounds wasn't involved in the surgery so we have no additional information this morning. Nathan's oncologist will speak with the surgeon later and give us a call.

We will update this entry later today so make sure to check the end to see if there is more information later.

It is later now. Nathan's urinary catheter stopped working again and he had to have yet another one placed. His urine was chrystalizing and the catheter was blocked. The nexw one has been working well. We will not likely let them place another one if this one fails.

We talked to Nathan's Onc about the surgery and he explained the areas in which the surgeons could not say for sure all the tumor was gone. We are waiting on the pathology of the tumor and the bone marrow test to come back and those results will determine if he has more chemo. We expect the bone marrow result mon or tues and the tumor pathology friday.

Nathan slept for about 4 hours this afternoon. He then watched 2 dvds and has now gone back to sleep. Hopefully he will not be awake all night.

He is still in ICU. This is just fine with us as it is a very nice private room with great nurses. I will stay tonight and Luke will go home and we will trade off. Luke's parents are here until sometime on Friday. We expect Nathan to go home somewhere around Monday.

Memorial hospital has a feature where you can send an e-greeting that will be printed and hand-delivered to the patient. If you want to do this cut and paste this link in your browser: http://mboard.memhospcs.org/web/patientcards.nsf/EGC?OpenForm

He is currently in room 3558 but this will change in a day or two so check back if you a sending a greeting.

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