December 5 – “Here we go again ...”

Here we go again.  At least this time we have a few days to prepare.  Chris had her follow-up appointment with the cardiologist yesterday.  She had a whole page of questions for him, not to mention the page of information on the symptoms she has been having and the two pages of documentation of her blood pressure readings since she got out of the hospital.  That’s one prepared patient.

 

The doctor had been in the cath lab doing procedures, and was headed back there after our appointment, so he was about thirty minutes late.  But once he came in and gave me a fist bump, he sat down and asked how things were going, giving us his full attention.  His nurse was there as well, and she was knowledgeable and helpful, too. 

 

I really do like this guy.  He bent over backwards to give us the answers to our questions.  In fact, he gave way more information than we asked for.  He explained exactly what happened on the treadmill.  In a nutshell, when her heart was stressed, instead of increasing capacity, it decreased.  On the good news side, he said there doesn’t appear to be any actual damage to the heart muscle. 

 

He showed Chris the images from her cath lab experience, pointing out the befores and afters.  That was really helpful to me, because what I understood him to say in the hospital was not at all what he carefully explained here.  Back then I thought he said there was a 30% blockage in a different artery as well as the 95% blockage in the one they stented.  With his explanation yesterday, we learned that there is indeed still another blockage, but it is in the same artery, just further down from the one they stented.

 

He was concerned that she is still having chest pains and shortness of breath on exertion, and even occasionally at rest.  They did an EKG, and it looked OK.  A few of the lines that were supposed to be going up still went down, but not as much as before the heart attack, so the stent seems to be working.  That means that the other blockage might be more severe than it looks on the 2D screen, and it is the culprit causing the pains.  There could also be a completely different, more sneaky culprit involved, however.  It could be some of the tiny veins supplying the heart are not doing their job effectively.  Or it could be that something screwy is going on in the lungs.  But the symptoms really seem to point to the heart being the problem.  So …

 

He tweaked one of her medications a bit in an “in the meantime” effort to control the pains a bit more.  There was also a “middle man” kind of test that he could do, but if I we did that one and she failed it, she would have to have another cath done anyway, so it sounded like the best approach would be to eliminate the middle man and go straight back to the cath lab.  They would put her on the table and do a stress test there.  He could also check out the stent already in there.  If everything looks good, she could go home right after the test.  If the blockage did look like it needed it, they could go ahead and put in a second stent right then.  So it’s back to the cath lab next week.  They will call and let us know what day, so she can be sure and get her COVID test before then.  Ah, protocols.  She is more worried about having to take that COVID test than she is about the cath.  But she’ll get through it.  Here we go again  ... 

 

John 1:12 says, “Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”

 

Father, would you be the God of Here We Go Again’s for us next week?  Amen.