Angie & Jim

Catheterization at Lucile Packardby Jim

We just checked in at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital for Angie’s catheterization. This is one of the many tests they want to do for her transplant evaluation. She’s had several of these before, so we’re pretty familiar with the routine. They’ll be putting a catheter up into her heart to measure pressures and function and see how her heart is doing. She stays awake the whole time, but under mild sedation. The procedure is low risk and should only take a couple hours. It’s really incredible to me that they can do something like this to gather the information they need. We’re really fortunate to live in a time and place that has the technology and personnel who can do this stuff.

Normally, this procedure is same day and we’d be going home afterward. Angie is 2nd in the cath lab today, so she’ll be going in around 10 PDT. They told us to be prepared to stay overnight for observation, but they told us that last time and we ended up going home that same day. I guess it really depends on what they see and how Angie recovers. I’ll post again after the procedure when we know more. Thanks for following along!

UPDATE 12:06: I’m in recovery with Angela and we just spoke to the surgeon. He said everything went well and he thinks we’ll probably go home today. (Yay!) Angie has to lay flat for a couple hours under observation before she’s allowed to get up, that’s to make sure she’s safe after going in through a major artery. I’ll add another post when we’re ready to head home.