Nate's Story

Life as they knew it changed for the Goldstein family the day five-year-old Nate was diagnosed with an advanced sarcoma in his leg. Every doctor they met gave him little chance of surviving, with amputation of his entire leg the only treatment choice. Every doctor, that is, until they met Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Leonard Wexler, who accepted neither the survival statistics nor the necessity of removing Nate's leg.

"Nate was well-appearing and very sweet when we first met," pediatric oncologist Leonard Wexler remembers. "I think he didn't quite 'get' what all the worry that his family was going through was about. If one didn't know what his scans looked like, one never would have been able to appreciate the gravity of his situation." Nate's tumor, which originated in the muscles in his left calf, had spread up lymph nodes in the leg into lymph nodes in his pelvis and even higher up toward his kidneys.