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.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Tuesday, June 21, 2005 7:11 AM CDT

Good morning.

Scan week begins today. Nathan will have a bone marrow aspiration and biopsy at 11:30. Tomorrow he has an MIBG injection and Thursday he has an MIBG scan and CAT scan. Hopefully they will not have to do the additional MIBG scan Friday morning. If he has too much of the radioactive isotope during his first scan they have to rescan. We have found that a little laxative helps prevent this from happening.

I have found wildly differing opinions about me being around Nathan while he is "radioactive" but have been comfortable with the explainations that say it OK. It has a very short half-life and I really just need to stay away from his bodily fluids.

Scan time is always stressful. Nathan is getting old enough to understand why we are doing the scans. Yesterday I told he might be having the bone marrows today (we didn't know for sure until 3:00 - isn't that lovely?). Later he started getting stressed out about not knowing and was saying "Mommy, but they have to do my back bandages tomorrow!". It was really sad to see him worry. Back bandages are what he calls the bone marrows since he doesn't remember anything - just comes out of there with bandages on him back. Recently he has had me explain to him what exactly they are doing to him. I have had to delicately explain that they stick a large needle into his bones!

I wanted to write about his birthday since I haven't gotten around to that yet. He had a John Deere theme that he had picked out from a catalog. I went to the grocery store with cake toppers in hand and they made a really wonderful cake with a farm scene on it. He was very pleased with it. His party was at a place that has a big room full of inflatable jumping things and slides. He and his friends had a blast jumping around. After jumping we retired to the party room and had cake and presents. All in all - it was the party he had wanted and he was very pleased. Afterwards we went out to dinner with my brother and his family.

Nathan has been telling everyone since then, "I'm Five now!".

We bought little bikes for Nathan and Julia. Julia seems pretty much unable to learn. Nathan is doing well - but he doesn't like when things are hard for him. He gives up really easily. So it is a bit of a challenge.

That about sums up what we have been up to. Please send all your prayers and positive thoughts our way for CLEAN results while we test this week. Nathan's friend Joshua, in Kansas, is also testing and scanning this week so please send some his way too.

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