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.

Friday, August 5, 2005

Friday, August 5, 2005 9:17 AM CDT

Luke here. Susan posted a pretty long entry last night, so if you didn't check it then you might want to visit the journal history.

I stayed with Nathan last night and he really had a pretty good night. Once we settled in to sleep we stopped hassling him about breathing deep and coughing. He was in some pain still from his incision and struggled a bit staying in a comfortable position, but really slept pretty well. This morning they hear good bowel sounds and he has started sipping juice. He isn't too terribly interested yet, but making progress. He had been off any supplemental oxygen for almost 3 hours when I left this morning and he was holding pretty well on his own. There was a bit of confusion this morning because his hemoglobin count showed a drastic drop. Normally they would have been worried about internal bleeding, but he looked so good that they thought the reading was probably too low for some reason (e.g. dilution) and they were rerunning tests. The quick tests showed that the initial readings were incorrect and that he is doing fine.

The intensivists and surgeons are very happy with his recovery. He looks like himself this morning with all of the puffiness and swelling coming down. They plan to pull his catheter and a-line (arterial IV) today and it looks like it won't matter if there is room in the observation unit because he is doing so well that they all agree he can go straight to "the floor".

Once we are back over at MSK we will post hospital room information and hopefully get an idea of how long they think we will be in. Several people have inquired about sending things. Please email Susan and I if you want and we can get an address to you. We will have better internet access from over at MSK and will get emails and be able to easier post updates.

Thanks for your continued support. No matter how much we say that in these posts, we can't convey how much you all prop us up and help us through this.

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