Mom Update 12-17-09

It has been a while since I posted about Mom, so I thought I would give you an update. She has good days and some not so good days. The good news is that the week of Thanksgiving was her last week to have taken dialysis treatments and her creatitine levels have stayed above normal, but lower than they had been. The bad news is that the fluid is building back up in her body. Her legs, her stomach, face, everything is full of fluid. She is taking some meds to help eliminate the fluid, but it isn’t doing too much good. Her weight goes up and down daily. This fluid build up is making it very hard for her to breathe. She also is running a fever off and on causing her to be extremely cold a lot of the time. She isn’t eating too much either. Nothing sounds good to her, so she isn’t real interested in eating. So, this makes her that much weaker.

On Tuesday, she had a heart catheterization. They wanted to take a closer look at her heart to see what was going on with it. What they determined (which they already somewhat knew) was that her right valve is not working properly. Basically what I understand is that the valve is not closing completely when the blood is flowing through it, allowing the fluid to come back out of the valve. This is what is causing her to have so much fluid build up and making her have such a hard time breathing.

So, what’s next? They put her on oxygen yesterday to see if that would help her breathe more easily. The heart doctor said he wanted to talk to her other doctors to see what they thought about a valve replacement surgery. This is a surgery that is not done often and is quite major. She saw her oncologist yesterday and he felt that she needed to have the surgery. He was going to talk to the heart doctor and other doctors as well and come up with a game plan. She sees the heart doctor on Monday.

Please keep praying for her!