08 April 2011

What Next?

Last week was the one year anniversary of my heart surgery. I know - nuts, right? When I was a whopping 37-years-old, I was diagnosed with a birth defect that had previously been unnoticed. It was an ASD, which is a hole in the heart. The catch is, all infants are technically born with it, but then the heart usually grows over the hole. Mine didn't, and at 37 I still had an 18mm hole that needed to repair so my heart could stop being enlarged from the extra work and heal its way back to normal.

Surgery actually wasn't complex from my point of view. A leading pediatric cardiology surgeon went in through two cardiac caths - one to take the device to be implanted, and one to take the camera so he could see what he was doing. After implanting the device was implanted, I needed to stay in the hospital overnight for observation. Once I was back home, it was business as usual!

If I thought that was simple, I can only imagine what will be coming next for people with electrosurgery! How totally sci-fi! I'm so grateful for my surgeon's skills. According to some information on the internet (which is always right, right?), a hole larger than 12mm usually requires crack-open-the-chest open-heart surgery for repair. Yikes!

One year post-op, my heart still shows some enlargement, but it's getting back where it should be, and I'm told 20 years have been added to my life expectancy! Now it's up to me to use them well!

2 comments:

siteseer said...

I'm always AMAZED by medical science and that the right person for the job always comes into our lives at just the right time. So glad you found your problem and that it was fixed so quickly. God is good.

The Adventures of Grunty and Chubbs said...

WOW - that added 20 years to your life!? That's awesome! So glad they found it and took care of it. :-)