Angie & Jim

Doctor Consultby Jim

Well, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that the procedure went fine and Angie is about an hour away from waking up and from us seeing her. The bad news is that they were not able to surgically eliminate the arrythmias they found in her heart. Every time they found one and tried to fix it, it just moved to another location. She said they tried fixing it 5 different times, but it didn’t seem to hold. They are planning on trying a new anti-arrhythmia medication and observing her for the next 2-3 days. This new medication is one of the two “strong” ones they use in cases like this. Both of them have adverse side effects, but since the other one didn’t seem to work, they’re going to try this one. Unfortunately, the side effects of this new one include extra strain on her liver, which is already damaged from her current heart anatomy. That’s also why they started with the other one first. Obviously, it didn’t work well enough, so they’ll try this one. The doctor also said that we’ll probably need to go ahead and start talking about another transplant evaluation in the near future.

We knew this was a likely outcome before we started, but they wanted to try the ablation anyway. There’s still a possibility that she’ll take well to the new meds and we can keep delaying our next transplant evaluation, but we’ll just have to wait and see.