Thank you to everyone who sent up prayers and positive thoughts! Patrick is out of surgery and in a recovery room for the evening while his cath sites heal, and he will be moved to a cardiac procedure recovery unit for the night, where he will be allowed out of bed. The doctor called and told me that Patrick did well throughout the procedure. He said in order to accurately map Patrick's heart, one of the things they do is they run electrical currents through the heart tissue at different times and they map what they see. When the voltage dips, that shows a part of the heart that is damaged. They also try to test the heart during an arrhythmia, which means they induce v-tach so they can see where it is originating from. They already have an idea of where they come from based on the mapping, previous mappings, and other charts and tests that have been run in the past. But a current v-tach while they are in there makes their work extremely accurate. Patrick's blood pressure dropped whenever they tried to induce an arrhythmia, so they went with what they already knew to determine where in the heart to ablate. But the doctor is optimistic that the work they did today will decrease the number of episodes Patrick has, and also lessen the severity. They will check back in three months to see how many episodes Patrick has had, and whether they were able to be paced out by the pacemaker or if his defibrillator had to shock the heart back into normal rhythm. None of this will get rid of the heart transplant. That is an unavoidable eventuality. But if we can postpone it for several years there is a good chance we will also improve Patrick's quality of life for a longer period of time. Transplants aren't easy, and if something goes wrong, its fatal. No do-overs. So if we can eek by with this procedure (possibly having to repeat it in the future) and a sizable and extreme medication regimen, we will. Again, thanks to everyone for the positive thoughts and well wishes. I won't update again until tomorrow unless anything changes. As long as he does well overnight, he will be coming home tomorrow! ... No one tell Patrick that the girls and I treated ourselves to Pagoda for lunch 😏
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