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.

Monday, November 10, 2003

Monday, November 10, 2003 5:18 PM CST

Susan here...

Well - the decision has been made - we will be going to New York for the surgery. They will not be doing the radiation during the surgery but the surgeon says he has seen tumors like Nathan's before and has been able to remove them. That is not something the other surgeon was willing to say. He of course gave us no guarantees that he could remove it but we know he has had lots of experience with neuroblastoma surgeries. It came down to the fact that if we did the surgery here and they didn't get it all we would regret not going to New York. If we go to New York and they don't get it all at least we can be confident that we had one of the best surgeons attempting it and at least we gave it a shot. I contacted Nathan's insurance case manager and she is working on getting approval. We have no idea how difficult that will be but we are committed to doing the surgery in New York whether insurance pays for it or we do. The durgeon says there are different ways they may be able to help us deal with insurance of the costs if neccessary. The surgery is scheduled for November 21 and we need to be there by the 20th. We have emailed the study doctor to ask him if we can expect to stay in New York and do the scans and antibodies all in the same trip. If so, we will be there for about 4 weeks.

We are going to start working on all the details now, but a weight has been lifted from us now that we made the decision.

Nathan was at the clinic today and doing just fine!

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