heart broken...

I expect a crazy week at our house, but after all...it is May!  Logan has 3 baseball games in 5 days and we are throwing karate into the mix.  John, my husband, will be in Houston all week for a certification program on solar energy, (yes, he is a nerd!)  And I have two important doctors' appointments to attend.

This morning, I met with my cardiologist who gave me some results from tests that I had run last week.  They showed that I have supraventricular arrhythmias occuring.  In very basic terminology, my heart has an electrical problem in the upper chambers of my heart.  Sometimes, it beats too fast.  Sometimes, it beats too slow, and the timing between beats is often irregular.  As I have Hashimoto's Encephalopathy, an auto-immune disease where antibodies made by my immune system are attacking neurons in the brain, creating erratic neurological impulses...it is fair to believe the two are related, but no one will commit to that just yet.  No matter what, we will treat it the same way regardless.  The blessing is that we are going to try to treat this.  I feared that they would say my disease created too many obstacles to treat aggressively.

It appears that we will treat this with a combination of a high-tech pacemaker and medications.  The fact that my heart changes speeds so often, they expect that the battery will need to be replaced every six years, rather than the 10 that many people are able to wait.  The fact that I am on immune suppressants has perks and complications.  This medication is used as an anti-rejection medication, but it increases my risk of infection.  They found mitral valve prolapse as well, but this only increases my chance for a bacterial infection in the heart.  They are not too concerned over this.  Initially, we will start medication and monitor its effects for two weeks.  If I have luck with it, we will wait as long as possible for the pacemaker.  If the medication slows the heart too much, then we will walk into the process of getting the pacemaker.  We are waiting on the results of one more test.  The computers  crashed while I was in the office.  Nice to know I am not the only one with technical issues!  If it shows that my heart is going into a block (getting confused and pausing for at least 3 seconds), then we will do the pacemaker immediately.  Driving will be a game time decision.  As my disease and status changes from minute to minute, the doctor wants me to be the one making the call.  He knows how life changing it would be for me to stop driving all together, so it will depend on how I am feeling and how I react to the medication. 

Lastly, if my prayer warriors would join me in praying about my appointment tomorrow.  As many of you know, the immune suppressant I take makes me 900x more likely to develop about 6 different kinds of cancers.  Those are not good statistics for long term use.  We found abnormal cells six months ago and had them removed.  I go in tomorrow for screening to see if they missed cells or if they have grown back.  It will take a couple of weeks for those results, but just going in for the screening has me a little worked up.

Thank you friends!  I also want to share that I have had other patients with HE read my blog, as well as physicians and they have contacted me.  God has created a network of patients for a really rare disease and I have been blessed to walk some of them through my journey.  I love it!