Nathan's Journey: Tuesday, October 28, 2003

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.

Tuesday, October 28, 2003 8:19 AM CST

Susan here..

Nathan went to the clinic yesterday and his counts are still good. His hemoglobin (red blood) was down a little. It seems to be bouncing back and forth while letting his marrow continue to produce white clood cells and platelets and that is just fine. He has been eating a little better and so as of a few minutes from now he will be off the supplemental nutrtion and so we will see how that goes. He doesn't need to go back until Thursday.

We are working on the insurance thing. Right now we are tentatively scheduled to be in New York on Nov. 17. It might have to be moved up a week. We will be switching to an insurance in January that will cover it and so if our insurance will not cover it we may pay out of pocket for the rest of this year depending on how much it is. It is frustrating to make financial decisions about your child's life.

We are also still figuring out if Nathan needs surgery and if he does it will need to be done ASAP. We feel that if he has another surgery it needs to be done right and so we may want to take him elsewhere for that. Potentially another insurance fight.

Basically we have a big time crunch for all of our decisions and it is very stressful. We still do not know yet if Nathan will have the MIBG scan on Thursday. That will be decided this morning most likely.

Luke and Julia will be heading home Wednesday afternoon to finish getting the house ready for Nathan. Nathan and I will return Friday or Saturday.

So - that's the current scoop. We'll update again soon.