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 29, 2004

Thursday, January 29, 2004 7:08 PM CST

Luke here on Friday morning. I'm top posting to Susan's update from yesterday. Susan posted a bit about Julia's rough night and lots of people have been asking about how she is doing, so I thought I would post a little. Overall she is doing wonderfully and coping very well with Susan and Nathan being gone and her first two weeks ever in day care. We have easily had more good evenings than bad ones. True, the bad ones are really bad, but we deal and she bounces back. She has a really good time at day care and we feel very lucky to have found the woman who is caring for her. It really is a good environment for Julia. It ia all so new and she misses Susan and Nathan and sometimes it is rough on her. Her trend seems to be to need a little emotional breakdown each day. If she has it during the day at day care, it lasts fifteen minutes or so and she gets over it. It is worse for her and I if she gets through the day without a meltdown. On those nights she has a major meltdown that can last a long time. I can understand her need to let out some of that frustration and we deal and she gets up and goes happily to day care the following mornings. Thanks for your concerns. Overall she is doing very well. We just can't get around the fact that this is hard on all of us in different ways.

*********************************

Another good day. No unusual medical reactions. At one point during his pain he said "mommy - I am not doing very well today" but he dealt with it well. Poor thing feels like he can't breathe. Today we had a little fight about the oxygen which was solved when he decided to hold it. We got a late start to the hospital this morning but got treatment started earlier than ever. The other families doing the same treatment told me that we didn't miss much that they had moved from one chair to another and even tried the couch this morning. We all sit and wait together every morning. Then we all go in our rooms at 9:00 even if they havnen't called us yet and usually someone will get the kids hooked up and on the way.

Nathan had a good nap afterwards and then we went to the grocery store.

Don't know about Julia's day yet but Luke and I are feeling better about it all and have been reassured that it is a normal reaction to a new situation.

Only one day left....what a relief! I made a call tonight about the next round of shots and Nathan asked me what I was talking about on the phone so I told him and said that tomorrow he would get his last shot for a few weeks. He said "Mom - that makes me so happy" then he said "shots hurt". He has actually been so amazing this week with them. Not a word about them or even a flinch when I poke him. He is so good at coping with things...I could learn alot from him. I suppose I have.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)