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.

Monday, February 9, 2004

Monday, February 9, 2004 11:53 AM CST

Luke here...I think this entry is going to be just how we like them. That would be boring. There isn't a whole lot to report. It is wonderful to all be together. We have had many consecutive weeks of me being on business travel before (home on weekends though). The separation with Nathan and Susan in New York and Julia and I here is different though. Emotions are pretty charged for all of us considering not only the being apart but also the reason and reality of Nathan's treatment. We are trying hard to really enjoy this time before we wind up and do it all again. To that end we had a pretty good weekend. We didn't do a whole lot. We did normal weekend stuff. We lazed, we ran some errands, and we hung out.

Nathan continues to do extremely well taking his accutane pills. He had never really taken pills before and these are fairly large. He never complains and asks for them after his breakfast and dinner.

Overall Nathan is doing well. Sometimes it is hard to reconcile where we know he is overall health-wise and his physical reality. What I mean is that being in a state where the doctors can't find any cancer he is uber-healthy compared to diagnosis and even right up to his last surgery. Even so he is really struggling to get back to normal physically. This has really had its toll on his little body. We figure in a four to five month period starting in September he had two significant surgeries, a stem cell transplant, and two rounds of antibody therapy in New York. He is still so skinny and weak. We are working on it though. Eating is a constant fight. He is constantly hungry but never eats much of anything. He will eat a little bit of a meal and then say he is full only to ask for "something else" a few minutes later. It has been not only annoying to deal with his insistence on having something else, but he really needs to eat well and a lot to help get his weight and overall health back. He has an appoitment today with his oncologist here in the Springs where the primary topic will be appetite and eating habits. Hopefully we can get a strategy together.

I guess that is a long enough post considering we don't have much going on.

000_0007

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