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, August 11, 2005

Thursday, August 11, 2005 7:34 PM CDT

Update Friday August 12, 2005

Just posting to say we had a really good time at the zoo today and mostly to say I finally update our family pictures. See the links in the orange type above.

************************************************

We have been having a nice time out of the hospital. Yesterday we had a leisurely morning and then headed down to Times Square to go to Toys R Us and out to lunch. We rested the rest of the day. Nathan is still going strong. He is getting around well. He actually attempted running around this afternoon. He is having some pain from his incision - especially when he lies down. He is on only Tylenol when he requests it.

He had his follow-up with the surgeons today and they say he is doing great. Everything is healing nicely and they are very pleased. He is cleared for normal activity.

We had a chat with his oncologist. The plan is to start the chemo on Monday. When the vaccine trial opens in about 6 week we will return. They want a CAT scan done in about 4 weeks - but they feel we should just do that in Colorado Springs and send the film to them. They want to have a "baseline" cat scan to use to compare future scans to. He will probably have an MIBG scan when he goes out to start the trial. He should normally only have to spend 2 days in the clinic for each round of the vaccine. If the vaccine is delayed we may continue the chemo if Nathan tolerates it well.

We talked about collecting more stem cells from Nathan. The doctor thinks it would be a good idea to try - but we all feel the likelihood of a good collection is not great and it is not an insignificant thing for Nathan to go through - so we will have to mull it over.

Back to our day today - after the clinic we walked down to the candy store and then had some lunch. It was very hot and so we went back home and Luke and I crashed - Nathan probably could have kept going. Tonight we had dinner with our friends John and Judy and then Luke went off to have drinks with an acquaintance from college. Tomorrow we have promised Nathan we will go to the zoo and on Saturday we will fly home!

So - I may not update again until we get home unless something crops up.

No comments: