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, October 22, 2003

Wednesday, October 22, 2003 10:34 AM CDT

Luke here...Sorry about the lack of updates. We haven't updated since Sunday. The weekend wrapped up pretty well. Nothing exciting except for a trip to Greeley to see Susan's brother. Monday I returned to work. We lack a broadband connection in our apartment which is essential to my being able to work remotely. It turns out I can use the network at the foundation house though, so I've spent most of my days here in the communal area of the foundation working. It is going okay. Nathan had an exam at clinic on Monday afternoon. His counts were very good. His ANC rose to over 3000 without any help from neupogen. The really surprising thing is his platelets. It has been 11 days since his last platelet transfusion. After he burned off the transfused platelets, he hovered in the mid-20s. Twenty is the cutoff for transfusion we are using right now. On Friday he was up in the high 20s so it was clear that his marrow was creating some platelets. Monday he was up to 40 so he is doing great on that front. His hemoglobin is a little low and bordering on the need for transfusion. I think he well get packed red cells before the weekend. So far his need for transfusion has been very little so he is doing awesome.

On the planning front we are still a little up in the air. He will have a CT scan of his abdomen on Thursday to get a new look at the remaining piece of tumor. we will hopefully have a MIBG scan next week to determine how much disease remains in his body after transplant. We are still working on details of future treatment. We are hopefull that once he gets his MIBG scan next week we will be able to move home to the Springs.

He has an appointment this morning. I'm going to try and do double duty of watching Julia while she plays here at the foundation house and working at the same time. We'll see how that goes. If anything interesting comes out of today's appointment we will add to this entry.

Thanks for reading.

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