19 May 2009

Amanda’s prayer request

It’s me again. Unfortunately when I went for my electrophysiologist appointment today, I didn’t walk away with what I wanted to hear. From what I can remember from our conversation, the gist was, you have hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy or ideopathic subaortic stenosis, your septal wall is double the thickness it’s supposed to be…….okay, fine, I know all of that already…..and on your 30-day heart monitor results, we found several spots of ventricular tachycardia, which is an abnormally fast rhythm that CAN be life threatening or may NOT end up worsening. To be on the safe side, since I’m a young mother of two and not an 80-year-old lady, he recommended that I undergo surgery and have an ICD put in, which is an implantable cardio-something defibrillator. The defibrillator would shock my heart when and IF the abnormal rhythms happen, thereby preventing fatal arrhythmias and blood clots that can happen if your heart’s not beating the way it’s supposed to. Since I have the heart disease, it’s causing it to beat irregularly at times. Most of the time, it beats fine, but the worst spell he caught on the monitor happened at 8:30 in the morning and I didn’t even know it was happening L He said it wouldn’t help the skipped beats I feel but it would be sort of like insurance that if a serious arrhythmia did happen, which it has in the past but corrected itself, I would be protected with an immediate response from the defibrillator to get things back the way they are supposed to be.

So this afternoon my husband and I had a good long cry and weighed our options and decided since we were well prayed up for today’s appointment that this is where we should go, to err on the side of caution since there is minimal complications from surgery and since I’m predisposed to having these abnormal rhythms.

Please pray for me as they schedule this surgery in the next day or so. It will probably only be a one-night stay, if that, and just two weeks recovery of not lifting my left arm above my shoulder and not lifting anything. Please pray, too, for an overwhelming peace and calm as the Lord is leading me through this. Love you all,
-Amanda