Daddy is out of his surgery. We’re not sure if this will solve it or not after all.  I’m going to go into nitty gritty details for my own sake so feel free to skip it.

Basically, the doctor that saw us in the other hospital was pretty sure it was SVT. He was going to do his ablation. By the way, this doctor is the one who put in Dick Cheney’s defibrillator so I assume that means he’s good…? Anyway, we find out today that he’s not going to do it, his partner is. He’s a specialist in arrhythmia, but his partner is a specialist in ablations and the first doctor said his partner is just as good, if not better, than he is (his own words) and the nurses here agree that this other doctor is “the best”. Ok good.

So anyway, this other doctor comes in to chat with us prior to taking him in. We have most of Daddy’s medical records with us but it doesn’t include the EKG readouts from when he was in the hospital in 2001 and 2004 for the atrial fibrillation. The doc read the EKGs from his recent heart monitor checks and says it does NOT look like VT or SVT, but atrial fibrillation and atrial tachycardia. So apparently cardiologists can’t read these things very well because the other two docs were wrong. That’s reassuring. But I trust this guy over the others.

Problem is, the ablation that he was planning doing will not help that. With atrial fibrillation/tachycardia, they can do an ablation but it’s a 4-5 hour surgery and is very complicated and requires a lot of prep (3d mapping of the heart and all that stuff). It’s not done very often and not many people do it. So we went into this with the expectation that it probably isn’t what we’ve thought and we’ll have to do this other ablation at some later date.

Well they get him in there and they have to place 4 catheters into his heart in specific places…well, when they get the fourth one to go in, as soon as it touched the top of his right atrium, it sends his heart into atrial fibrillation. Since it’s in a-fib, they need to convert him back to regular sinus rhythm so they try a cardioversion. This is where they shock his heart, basically stopping it, so it can restart at normal rhythm…think of those paddles they use in the movies to bring people back to life, that’s what they had to do. But it didn’t work the first time, so they did it again. All of this was done while he was AWAKE. He said it was a pretty effed up experience, to put it mildly.

So they get him back into regular rhythm and through the study they can’t get him to go into SVT or a-fib but what the Dr. did was go ahead and ablate the top of the right atrium (where it had stimulated the a-fib). IF, and it’s not likely, but IF that was the problem (which would be very rare, about 1% of cases) then this ablation would fix it. But if it doesn’t, then he’ll need the other more complicated surgery at some point.

So we just wait and over the next several days he has to figure out if he’s having those problems anymore and if he does, he’ll go back on meds and we’ll talk more about the other procedure. If he doesn’t feel anything wrong anymore, then that fixed it and he should be fine.

1% is rare, but I’ll tell you what, there are a lot of 1%’s in his family and I was not surprised in the least to find out that he might have something rare. That just seems to be the name of the game with him and his family.

He should be released tomorrow, right now he’s just sleeping off the Versed and he has to lay flat and still for 4 hours. Then I’ll get him something to eat since he hasn’t had anything since 9am. Then I get to go to sleep on a tiny little couch. One more night…one more night…one more night…

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you, but you must be really bored LOL

Sheesh, between this and the surrogacy I am learning quite a bit about how the body works.