This afternoon, Dr. Murphy stopped by.\u00a0 Dr. Murphy was Angie’s primary cardiologist when we first moved here and had been until only recently, when they transitioned her over to Dr. Lui.\u00a0 Dr. Murphy has taken on more of an administrative role for the heart clinic and so he doesn’t spend much time with patients anymore.\u00a0 He does, however, continue to be involved in decision-making meetings over his former patients.\u00a0 He’d been in Cleveland this week, but still aware of the situation.\u00a0 He wanted to stop by and see how Angie has been, which was really nice of him.\u00a0 He really is a great doctor.\u00a0 Anyway, he said a few things that we thought were interesting.\u00a0 One thing he mentioned is that when there is high pressure in the blood, it will act just like when there is lots of traffic on the street: some cars will spill over onto surface streets to get through.\u00a0 With blood, he said that our blood with actually make new pathways to get around the areas of high pressure.\u00a0 Sometimes when this happens, you get oxygen rich blood that finds another path to the oxygen poor blood, which is called a shunt.\u00a0 He said they weren’t uncommon with patients like Angie.\u00a0 He seemed hopeful that they’ll be able to fix them, if that is what has happened.\u00a0 I think it helped Angie to see him so optimistic about things.\u00a0 I’ve always been really impressed by his doctoring.<\/p>\n
After he left, Angie made a really interesting point.\u00a0 We know that the fluid build-up was causing abnormally high pressures in her heart before they drained it off.\u00a0 It seems very reasonable that this high pressure caused a shunt to form which would explain this oxygen saturation problem we’re facing.\u00a0 Seems logical to me.\u00a0 Let’s just hope it was formed in a place that can easily be repaired.<\/p>\n
Jon & Brittany came by to visit and we played a couple hands of All Hands On Deck, the card game we’ve invented.\u00a0 It was fun to play and visit with family.\u00a0 It lifted our spirits a bit.\u00a0 Jon also helped me administer the sacrament and give Angie a blessing.\u00a0 I’m really glad they could come.<\/p>\n
I’ve been reading The Fellowship of the Ring<\/em> to Angie over the last couple days.\u00a0 We both love the book and Angie has always loved being read to while in the hospital.\u00a0 We’ve often used the Lord of the Rings<\/em> trilogy books because we can start from any of them and end anywhere without worrying about how it begins or ends.\u00a0 While Tolkien can ramble on about the country side quite often, he really is brilliant in the characters he created.\u00a0 We both love the friendships of those in the fellowship.\u00a0 We just finished reading the part where Merry, Pippin, Sam, and Fredegar tell Frodo about their conspiracy to come with them.\u00a0 Love that part.<\/p>\n So, as things stand right now, I think the soonest we could go home is Wednesday.\u00a0 Obviously, things would have to go quickly and very well over the next couple days.\u00a0 Angie’s saturation levels have actually looked really good for the last few hours (over 90, even while sitting up a bit to eat dinner), so that is a bit encouraging.\u00a0 I even saw it get to 99%, but it was only for a split second before falling back to the typical 91-92%.<\/p>\n I’ve had two different people from work offer to donate some vacation time to me.\u00a0 The lab has a program that lets you donate vacation to someone else who is in need.\u00a0 There are restrictions about how it can be used, but I would be eligible this week once my vacation is used up.\u00a0 I can’t say how much it means to me to have anyone even offer to do something so selfless.\u00a0 I feel so strongly that my place is right here by my wife’s side, and it pains me to stress about work when I feel loyal to both my employer and my wife.\u00a0 But, my loyalty to my wife trumps everything else.\u00a0 I’ve managed to get some work done, but not much.\u00a0 If I can work a bit during the day, I can make my vacation stretch a little longer.<\/p>\n Thanks for reading, and thank you all for all the prayers and support.\u00a0 We love you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This afternoon, Dr. Murphy stopped by.\u00a0 Dr. Murphy was Angie’s primary cardiologist when we first moved here and had been until only recently, when they transitioned her over to Dr. Lui.\u00a0 Dr. Murphy has taken on more of an administrative role for the heart clinic and so he doesn’t spend much time with patients anymore.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[21,8,13],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8WrW-jg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1195,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions\/1195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}