Let me begin by announcing that Patrick made it to Seattle yesterday and has his first appointment, an echocardiogram, this morning! Thank you, Jesus - we were so worried he wouldn’t make it. My last blog post was on April 20th. So much has happened in the last 19 days. Patrick tried a liquid diet and found it didn’t make any difference in how sick he gets when he eats or drinks. He also discovered if he boils vegetables down to mush, he can create a soup that makes him less sick than just about everything else. I made a comment in my last post about Patrick having to slow down and how that goes against his nature. For the last seventeen years he has refused to allow heart failure to slow him down. I always say, "You would never know his heart is failing, just by looking at him." He is a man who is always in motion. He always has a project going at home, or a customer's knife to work on. He is always out helping a client or a friend with whatever they might need. He loves to go shopping. Lord help me, does that man love to shop. But this recent downturn in his health has forced him to slow down. I still wake up and find laundry washing and the dishwasher running, but home projects have decreased. He isn't taking custom work, and we thank God for the extra time he spent in the garage during Covid working up an inventory for the shop. It has eased his burden considerably. At the time I wrote the last blog post, family shopping trips had also, and their pace had slowed down. Sometimes they were cut short. Walking from one side of Fred Meyer to the other would steal Patrick's energy. He refuses to ride a motorized cart. All of that goes against his fast moving, social nature. He says he won't let heart failure rob him of his life, but that's exactly what it was doing. Over the last three weeks that has improved. We have gone out walking at Pioneer Park after work several times and he does okay. I have seen him roughhouse with the kids, and belly laugh without feeling like it was going to trigger a heart event. We haven't been able to get answers as to why food makes him sick, but we may be closer after his recent trip to the emergency room. This doctor said Patrick likely suffers from what is knows as stomach angina. He said Patrick's heart is too weak to fully support the second most powerful organ in the body; the stomach. He recommended lighter foods and even meal replacement drinks. Patrick tried the drinks but they make him as sick as if he had just eaten a regular meal. So, gone are his taco nights, his grilled burger dinners, and the meals where he grazed on the kids leftovers. He has lost twenty five pounds in just a few months. He tried drinking warm jell-o and it gave him painful chest pressure. He boils his vegetables until they are beyond recognition, and while they still give him nausea, its better than anything else. Except granola bars. His body is like a riddle. Tell me, why can he eat granola bars without becoming nauseous? I have talked to him about his weight loss a lot. He is down nearly 35 pounds, probably now weighing what he did when he was in his 20s. If the doctors can’t get his weight to stabilize, I wonder if he may not be far off from needing a feeding tube. So that’s life right now. Chaotic, stressful, busy as always. I put off writing an update post because I didn’t have the emotional capacity to devote so much time to writing about what has been going on. This last week has been one of the most stressful times of my life. He has the echo today, and a meeting with the heart failure specialist on Wednesday. Then on Friday he has a follow-up with the electrophysiologist who performed his ablation in May 2020. What are we hoping to come out of these appointments? We want his medication tweaked. Two or three doctors up here, especially the one who diagnosed Patrick with stomach angina, have recommended a course of nitroglycerin. But they won’t prescribe it because Patrick often has blood pressure that’s too low, and nitro lowers it even further. At any given time Patrick might have anywhere between 80/50 and 110/70. If the doctors in Seattle can tweak his blood pressure medications, or any of his other prescriptions, maybe they can find a combination that would enable Patrick to take nitro. Although we are not doctors, Patrick and I suspect he won’t qualify for a heart transplant. I think we would feel okay with that if the doctors could somehow improve his quality of life. Not being sick enough to qualify isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but living with constant nausea and the plethora of other heart failure symptoms that Patrick endures every day is… There are no words. I have front row seats to his suffering. This isn’t the life we envisioned having together. Please pray for him. Keep him in your thoughts. Send good vibes. People say it takes a community to raise a child. I say it takes a community to provide a solid foundation for a family going through what we’re going through, to get by day after day. And we love our community. We appreciate you - the silent readers and those who reach out; people we run into while out and about; the ones we attend church with; close personal friends; family members. You all are like a buffer, the squishy, inflatable bumper as we zigzag our way down the lane towards the invisible pins at the end. Some of you are the ramp, guiding us. All of you are the crowd, cheering us on. We appreciate you.
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