Hi everyone,
It’s been an extremely long day, but we’re finally back to the room. The meeting with the surgeon went well, and it looks like we have a plan for Natalie.
As we said yesterday, her pressures were up and her current anatomy isn’t going to work. They have a surgery date scheduled tomorrow, and we’ll take Natalie over at 7:00 am. Dr. delNido will be doing an open-heart procedure to get the atrial pressures and her lung pressures to go down. Right now, some of the pressures are so high that she isn’t even a candidate for a transplant or any other procedure. They will join the pulmonary artery and aorta in order to shunt blood and lessen the lung pressures. They will also put a band on the pulmonary artery. They will keep her in a coma for several days after the surgery in order to keep all the pressures down as her body adjusts to this new anatomy.
This will be done in order to get her to a place where we will have some options. The transplant is still an option, but obviously that would be done as a last resort. We will monitor for a few months after the surgery to see how she is adjusting, and how her heart is doing. If all is well, there is a good chance that Dr. delNido could do another procedure to make the right side of her heart do a majority of the work while keeping her left side operating and helping the right side. This would be optimal since she’d be able to keep her heart and would have a much better quality of life than she would if she has a transplant.
This was just a quick overview of what they’ll be doing. Heidi and I will update as we learn more, and to let everyone know how each step along the way is going. Thank you again for the prayers, we appreciate them very much.
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