Thursday, October 30, 2008

Since people have been calling and e-mailing me...

Here's where things stand:

  • For most of the year, my wife has been having heart problems. Irregular rhythm, blood pressure spikes and tachycardia. I've seen her HR hit 209 bpm! 
  • Doctors have ruled out psychological disorders (stress, anxiety, etc), endocrine disorders, (hormones) and many other potential causes. We've spent a lot of time at the hospital this year.
  • Doctors suspected Supraventricular Tachychardia (SVT), a condition where the heart more or less gets duplicate signals, occasionally beating 2x normal. We had scheduled an appointment to discuss further treatment options.
  • My wife went to the ER Last Friday with another one of her episodes.  She had several episodes in the hospital prior to the procedure. 
  • Doctors logged the attacks, but they seemed to be a different kind of tachycardia, not specifically SVT.
  • She went into catheter surgery on Monday. The Electrophysiologist and Cardiologist did not find anything that would cause SVT -- not a surprise, given the data we saw. 
  • While catheterized, doctors did some ablation (removal of nerve tissue) in order to stabilize her heart rhythm. That seems to have worked to a certain extent. praise GOD! 
  • The ablation procedure caused some irritation and now she's still in the hospital with pericarditis. The pericardium (protective lining around the heart) is swollen and putting pressure on her internal organs. It's a common and easily treatable condition, but it's frustrating that my wife's been in the hospital for almost a whole week.
Hopefully, she'll come home tomorrow night, after they're done giving her treatments for the pericarditis. After that, it'll take a few weeks of healing and probably some experimentation with various medicines before we know for certain how well this whole trip to the hospital worked out.

My wife an I are extremely thankful for the calls, e-mails, comments and support.

5 comments:

Sirrus Rider said...

Hang in there Noah!

Doug said...

Scary stuff. Hope they can get it all figured out and get things back to normal.

Joel Kershner said...

My hopes and prayers are with you both.

Anonymous said...

our thoughts are with you and your wife. I hope they find out what is going on and she can start the road to recovery.

Dean Fuhrman said...

Hope all turns out well. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.

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