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, October 10, 2003

Friday, October 10, 2003 11:20 PM CDT

Luke here...Another good day. We had an appointment at our oncologists' clinic at 9:30am. Nathan's counts were surprisingly good. We stopped giving him the drug that boosts white cell production. His white counts were really good and the docs felt that we were probably holding back his platelet production by artificially stimulating white growth. His ANC has fallen, but not too bad. We will likely need a dose of neupogen sometime next week to get him back up, but his white counts are still high. He hasn't needed red cells in a long while now. It is shocking. Similiarly, his platelets aren't crashing nearly as fast as we expected. I guess this is what getting good stem cells is all about. In some ways he is already doing better than after normal rounds of chemo it seems. His reliance on tranfusions and neupogen will probably last longer in the long term though and of course his immune system in general will be severly compromised for some time. He had a platelet transfusion at TCH after our appt at the clinic. We are free from scheduled visits to either clinic for the weekend. Yahoo!

Susan went down to the Springs this afternoon. She plans on bringing Julia up to Denver tomorrow morning and we will be a family together again for the first time since September 17. Nathan and I had a good afternoon and evening. He is doing much better about his meds and mouth care. We took a walk and he walked a good long way. It wore him out pretty good, but he is getting some stamina back.

Looks like CaringBridge is doing some service this weekend. The page may be down or unavailable for updates or guestbook additions for up to 72 hours starting sometime tomorrow.

I'm beat. Good night.

No comments: