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, March 17, 2004

Wednesday, March 17, 2004 6:33 PM CST

Hello -

Today Nathan and I got up very early and headed off to Denver. We arrived early and so did the doctor so he brought us right in to an exam room and got started. He thinks Nathan most likely has damage to the walls of his intestine caused by all his treatments. This damage can repair itself but since Nathan has had treatment upon treatment without a chance for it to recover he is still healing. He thinks the recent change in his stools is a good sign that things are getting better. He also thinks Nathan might have an overgrowth of bacteria in his bowel and we are going to give him a medication for that.

For the other problem - to provide relief for now we are going to give him fiber twice a day mixed in with a drink, lactaid before every dairy product and beano before every meal. This damage he has makes his body unable to digest sugars and starches. I am crossing my fingers that these medications will help. He will now be taking about 14 pills a day and a liquid medicine 3 times a day. So far he has done well today. I got him the lactaid as a chewable. The oral medicine reportedly takes awful so we might switch that to a pill form as well. I went to get the liquid filled and they didn't have it and now I have lost the prescription so I will have to do something about that tomorrow.

After Denver we went out to lunch and then Nathan had a nap. I woke him up and he went to the clinic for blood counts. He is still anemic (no surprise ) and so they gave him something for that. We left the clinic and got Julia and are now relaxing before bed.

Tomorrow I have to draw Nathan's blood for the HAMA test and Fedex it to New York.

Just to add more things to my plate I must have lost my driver's license on the plane home so now I have to go get documents out of the safety deposit box and find some kid free time to go wait in that FUN line. I need my license before I get back on the plane to NY. I am feeling quite overwhelmed. The house is a mess - I am many months behind in organizing financial things - dealing with medical bills - I have several projects around the house that really need to be done. Argh! I want to spend time with the kids but when I am with them I am always doing two other things at once. Well - enough complaining....someday I suppose I will catch up. I just really wish I hadn't lost my drivers license because I am going to lose half a day taking care of that.

Nathan has been giving me lots of hugs today - I suppose I look like I can use one - he is so sweet.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)