Good Morning! I am writing this from our bed, after a full night’s sleep, with John beside me. My heart is full. As I mentioned, I won’t be updating this as frequently as before but I wanted to share with you all the report from the doctor before we were discharged. 

While in ICU, John received an electrocardiogram to look at his heart, and the technician did a thing called a bubble test. She saw a shunt, or a hole in his heart, called a PFO, and said that he would need further testing to confirm. Two days later, John underwent a TEE procedure (transesophageal echocardiogram) in which they put a camera down his throat to look more closely at the hole, and the doctors couldn’t find it!!! As we mentioned before, this was good and bad news, because we wanted to determine a cause of the stroke so we could prevent it from happening again, and a hole in his heart would have been the most obvious answer. 

John also received an extensive panel of blood tests, looking for any disorders to cause clotting or really just anything that looked out of the normal. The doctor informed us yesterday before we left that they all came back normal!!! Now there is no bad news about that, but it just adds to the complexity of his case regarding why this happened to him. 

The doctor said that 40% of strokes are idiopathic, so there is a chance that we will never know why this happened. Of course we’ve been asked 100s of questions, such as “Have you worked around hazardous chemicals?” and “Have you broken a bone recently?” We are racking our brain trying to make sure we aren’t leaving anything out - but honestly, we can’t find one good reason why this happened. 

John was discharged with several medications and directions to start doing things at his own pace. We were in the middle of a lot of projects so we are re-evaluating our priorities and trying to figure out what’s most important to us. At the moment, rest and spending time with friends and family are #1 and then getting ready for peaches is next. 

I cannot tell you all enough how important your support has been/continues to be. It has given us encouragement when we felt fear, laughter when there were tears, and comfort when it hurt. It is a miracle how far he has come in such a short amount of time and we can’t wait to celebrate with each of you. In the meantime, thoughts and prayers for a full recovery and a renewed sense of confidence while figuring out our new normal would be awesome. Another update soon. 

- Lindsay and John - and Roky and Bea too!