To begin, thanks so much for visiting. I promise future posts won't be nearly as long as this one is sure to be. We thought it might be helpful to keep people up to date with some recent developments in our little world. Today's post will hopefully begin to fill anyone interested in with the happs of the situation and what to expect moving forward. Bottom line... My heart is a little broken down and in need of some upgrades. I need to "pimp my ticker". I know, right, it's great news there's actually one in there...even if it is the size of a pea and hard as a rock! Really though, I have a bicuspid aortic valve, which is a very frequent and fixable heart defect. It's actually the most common type of heart defect, present in about 1-2% of the population. It's likely some of you have it, too. Most people live an entire lifetime never knowing they have it, or there is no need to do anything about it. Mine just happens to be causing s...
Eric's here at MCR for another night, but should be discharged tomorrow. We haven't heard much about the cultures or their results, but he did kick the fever.... And of course, that's a good thing. They want to keep him here just to make sure that fever doesn't return. The echo cardiogram results freaked us out. The cardiologist that read and reported on the echo stated that Eric's valve has "moderate regurgitation". Eric's repair in Cleveland brought him from "severe" regurgitation to "trace-mild" regurgitation. Our immediate fear from this information is that the repair is failing. Still, we know that this report came from one cardiologist's interpretation. The results were concerning enough, that a transesophageal ecocardiogram test or "TEE" was ordered. Eric's had this one before.....so he kinda knew what to expect. They stick a big ol wand with a camera down your esophagus with a whole bunch of Versed (to...
Eric's evolution from day 4 to yesterday was pretty remarkable. I'm sure we're going to have some "bumps in the road" over the next few days, weeks and months, but so far, he's doing really well. Dr. Svensson made his rounds with his team yesterday morning. It was a about a 5 second interaction. Kinda wild that Eric spent a total of 15 awake minutes (unless you count YouTube 😉) with this person that was inside his chest repairing one of his vital organs. So of course, Eric and I went and captured a moment with Dr. Svennson before Eric was discharged. Eric's got a cool scar on the outside and a bit of hardware on the inside. The valve itself was repaired with some crazy felt type fiber, but he has 7 wires tied like a shoelace through his sternum. (I wish I would've asked for the x-ray image, but maybe we'll get a hold of it later.) He also has a bit of one pacemaker wire left in. The wires are placed within the heart during surgery and left...
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