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.

Thursday, January 1, 2004

Thursday, January 1, 2004 8:14 AM CST

Happy New Year!!!!

I will update on yesterday. Nathan and I went to his appointment at 11:30 and they had rescheduled and one person thought another person had called us and vice versa and so Nathan and I did a little shopping and he asked for Taco Bell and we enjoyed hanging out downtown. I called Nathan's local oncologist and talked to him about radiation choices (which I will get into in a minute) and also about Nathan's overall health. We will bring him in next week to see him. He still is having diarrhea and he is so very skinny, weak and tired. These are things his New York docs are not concerned with but things we feel are affecting his quality of life and his local docs will work with us on.

As far as the radiation goes.. in New York they do their radiation twice a day for 14 sessions. We had talked to the New York docs about why and there are some theoretical advantages to doing it that way. I talked to the raditaion oncologist about it and he was fine with either way. I decided to go for twice a day for a few reasons. I will take any cancer killing advantage that may exist and also that means 7 days of treatments for Nathan instead of 12 and a nice break before going back to New York. The downsides to twice a day are that the side effects of radiation could be intensified. The side effects are nausea, vomitting and diarrhea. He will be on some medication to prevent nausea and we hope that will not be so bad. Of course this also means he has to go twice a day but I think he will be OK with it. They are a great group of people there and they have ice cream and popsicles!

The long term side effect of the radiation is that the right kidney will be heavily radiated and likely damaged. The left kidney will be completely out of the radiation field so it really should not be a problem. They are radiating only the abdomen/chest area.

I will be able to watch Nathan via a camera while he is on the table. We went and looked at the room and talked about being able to see and hear him in there and I think he will do just fine.

So - we will start on Monday and finish the following Tuesday.

Today Luke's parents and sister will be leaving to go back home. We haven't decided what we will be doing today. We still haven't unpacked completely so we will probably need to do a little work around the house. Oh - and watch some football too!

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