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, March 17, 2005

Thursday, March 17, 2005 5:52 PM CST

Well - so far the news as as good as it could be.

Nathan woke up still limping but it has gotten alot better during the day. The doctor did an exam and he didn't even see the pain until I showed him what motion I could do that caused it. Nathan admitted it was less. However - it could still be cancer and the pain could come and go and so I go to the next part - the labs.

His blood counts (hemoglobin, etc) were normal. At diagnosis he was anemic due to the bone marrow dysfuntion caused by the cancer - but that would only happen at very high levels of cancer.

We just now got a call on some more of his labs:

LDH is normal. This is elevated when there is a lot of tumor activity. So - it doesn't mean there is none - but it does indicate he doesn't have a massive relapse.

His other labs that show how his bone marrow are working came back fine - once again indicating there is not a massive amount of cancer in his bone marrow.

We are still waiting for (and at this point won't get until tomorrow) his sed rate and crp. This would be elevated if there is inflammation happening in his body. If they come back elevated we will immediately start doing tests to find a cause. It could be cancer, but it also could be an infection. If it is elevated - he will have some xrays and an MRI - but I am not sure how soon they would get him in for those.

I asked his doctor - would he expect the LDH to be elevated if it was cancer that was causing the pain and he said yes. So - while we cannot rule out cancer at this point, it doesn't seem as likely as it did yesterday.

We did collect his urine for the HVA/VMA test which is elevated if there is neuroblastoma. That test takes at least a week to come back though.

We will probably do scans in the next few weeks.

I am so thankful to have the hope that this is not a relapse. Yesterday we were so sure and at least, today we feel there is a good chance it is not relapse. We don't want to get our hopes up too high though.

If it is relapse - we have certainly dealt with the fear now and are ready to face it if it should happen.

Nathan told us he had a good day. I think it is mostly because his DAD came with him for all of this! He just came up to me while I was writing this and kissed me on the cheek.

So - we'll see what the sed rate and crp are tomorrow and go from there.

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