"The top 10 reasons why I love Myeloablative chemotherapy with Autologous stem cell rescue support:
10. You see people at
their best. It is past unbelievable how much care and concern are expressed on behalf of Nathan. From the lowest to the highest of people who know or meet Nathan, they continually offer to do anything they can to help us.
9. In Louisville, you are served by what must be the finest doctors and nurses in the free world. I mean Dr. Bertolone, Dr. Cheerva, Dr. Raj, Dr. Ayyanar, and Dr. Ahuja, and the nurses of 7 West, Oncology Special Care Unit, (nurse Angie, Tiffany, Laine, Abby, Elaine, Nicole, etc.) and the other professionals here at Kosair.
8. You learn to celebrate victories in small packages. Nathan’s ANC today is .8 and his white blood cell count today is .09 (in thousands of WBC per micro-liters of his blood. That is in the neighborhood of 100 times below normal
[ANC thousands of times below normal] and he is vulnerable to practically every biological microorganism on the planet . . . BUT . . . his WBC count is 9 times higher than it was yesterday and the highest it has been in 5 days, and to us non-medical parents it looks like an early sign his stem cells are engrafting and getting busy making blood products in his bone marrow.
7. You get a new perspective on misery. In the Bible, Job sat in the ashes and scraped his decaying skin with a broken piece of pottery. What would make a person do that? I know, because I watch Nathan in his abject misery struggle through the valley of this transplant. His skin looks like he has been boiled in water like a potato.
6. You learn to focus and pay attention. There are myriads of details of Nathan’s care that we his parents – his advocates – can attend to for him. If something gets missed as it easily can – he pays. That
only happens once or twice and you learn to pay attention.
5. You get a renewed appreciation for the marvels of medical science and the accomplishments we human beings have made at improving life on earth. At the heart of it is the gift of intelligence and competency that God has given human beings. Nathan’s last bite of solid food was probably twelve days ago. Yet in some ways he is thriving; he is being propped up from almost every physical angle.
4. One thing that I remember from my IronMan days is that the human body thrives under a sustained load. Not necessarily in Nathan’s
case, but with the proper fuel and the ability to cool itself, the human body can put out a tremendous amount of work over a sustained period of time. Many of us seldom exercise our bodies in that way, but the human body is a real machine. God made it that way, and it is good.
3. The church is made up of people who really believe in God and his Son Jesus and have placed their faith and trust in him as their Savior and Lord. There are people who scoff at the church, find it completely boring to attend the services, or consider it made up of a bunch of hypocritical self-righteous fundamentalists or something. In our family’s time of need these past seven months, our church here in Louisville, Ninth
and O Baptist Church and our home churches back in Georgia, have been overwhelmingly loving and supportive of our family. I am almost ashamed of how well we have been taken care of. We have also seen people and churches of the Catholic faith working just as hard, very hard, lately for less-fortunate people.
2. You get humbled under God’s mighty hand, and remember your place before him. Though the Lord is on high, he looks upon the lowly, but the proud he knows from afar.
No. 1, the look of trust and acceptance in my son’s eyes, when he lays
in bed, feverish and miserable, with alligator tears staining his pillow, when you get real close to his face and say, “Son I want you to know that your mother and I love you very much and I know you may not feel like it but you're getting better. Can I say a little prayer for you?”"
GUESTBOOK SIGNED 
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