Hi everybody! I wanted to give an update on mom’s progress. It has good news and bad news. Sometimes it’s hard to understand someone’s situation by words from a post, but I will attempt to paint an accurate picture.

Friday, July 30th, mom went to the cath lab to get a stent placed in her LAD. Through the doctor’s testing leading up to the procedure they believed that her LAD graft (one of the bypass’s that she received during open heart surgery) had failed and they believed that her LAD (one of the main arteries in her heart) was 99.9% blocked. The procedure was high risk and they prepared us for a lethal outcome. The risk was high but they believed that the risk of no procedure was just as high. During the procedure, they introduced the dye which provides a high level of detail of the heart’s vessels ability for blood flow. They realized that the heart is getting more profusion than they were thinking. So she came back from the procedure with no stent. That was great news.

Since that day, she has been improving even though they technically didn’t even do anything during the procedure. The heart failure doctor just believes that she is taking time to heal. She is eating and conversing more. She is even able to push the nurse’s call button, operate some of the buttons on her bed, and pick up her water.

She is not able to get out of bed on her own power or even get herself to sit on the side of the bed. She is too weak still.

Monday or Tuesday of this next week she is scheduled to get an ICD (internal cardiac defibrillator). This is a low risk procedure and she is getting the device as a safety net. If her heart decides to go into a funky rhythm – the ICD will try to pace her out of that funky rhythm and if that doesn’t work it will defibrillate her heart. She will not be paced all the time.

One of her big hurdles right now is that she is having very high levels of anxiety. Rightfully so. It has been a very traumatizing 6 weeks for her. She gets extremely anxious about getting out of bed, even though she has two nurses on either side of her. She has huge fears that she is going to fall. She is extremely anxious about taking medicine because she has huge fears that she is going to choke on the pills. And as you can imagine she is on a BUNCH of meds every day. She frequently has spells of breathing difficulty. These spells are present when she does physical therapy, takes her medicine, and also just randomly while lying in bed. She also has nightmares that she is not doing well medically. We are working with the doctors to get this resolved but it’s not getting fixed as fast as we would like.

The staff here is expecting her to be discharged at some point during this week. This is amazing news!! She will be transferred into a cardiac rehab facility. We are not sure exactly how long she will be in rehab. We were turned down by the first cardiac rehab facility because she was too weak. She must be capable of doing 3 hours of PT every day. We are waiting to hear back from the second facility we applied to. 

We are thankful she is alive, we realize what a miracle it is for her to still be here with us.  Selfishly, we want her to be able to now LIVE.  And, like Erin said in a post before that her body is fighting for her, even when her spirit can't.   She can't see yet how far she's come.  But we do.   Please pray with us for an acceptance from this second facility and that the transition into rehab center would bring with it a lift in her spirits and fuel hope in her for her a stronger tomorrow.

With hope,

Harry, Steve, Erin, Carrie and Clay