Post op day 52 ~ We had a good day today.The Kankakee Journal interviewed Courtney by phone and the Post Bulletin in Rochester came to photograph her. On Monday, a local News station is doing a story on her for February, which is American Heart Month. The article in the Kankakee Journal should run this weekend. Courtney is only the 3rd person in the world to have the particular type of heart and liver transplant she received. Normally the heart would go in first because of the need to get the donor heart into the recipient immediately before it loses its oxygenation. Due to Courtneys high antibodies from years of blood transfusions she would reject her new heart if they transplanted it before the liver. Her antibodies would immediately begin to try and attack the new heart with irreversible damage. Mayo has discovered that if they exchange the plasma in the patient right before surgery and then implant the liver before the heart and let it circulate for a while, the new liver will clear a majority of the antibodies protecting the new heart when it goes in. The other two patients they have performed this particular transplant on last year are doing very well. The medical community finds this type of story very interesting. We are so Blessed and our trying to use this opportunity to create more awareness about organ donation. Tomorrow Courtney will have a cardiac catheterization and a biopsy of her heart to check for any sign of rejection. Her echocardiogram from yesterday still showed good heart function, praise God! Her hemoglobin and protein levels remain low even after a blood transfusion yesterday so we are going through testing to see see what may be causing this. She is still retaining a lot of water in her feet and legs so we are trying to fine tune some of her meds and she is received IV diuretics all day today to pull some of the excess fluid off. She still has all of her staples in her chest and abdominal incisions and is very anxious to get those removed which they plan on doing within the next week. Everything is healing very nicely though. She has a persistent cough that wont go away. They had an ENT doc come tonight, numb her nose and put a camera down her nose to look at her throat. The did find that the right side of her vocal cord is underactive due to the ventilator, but they dont feel it is the source of the cough so she has to go to a procedure this week to explore that further. They actually have a clinic as an outpatient called a cough clinic where she will be followed. We were hopeful she would be discharged on Friday but now it looks like it wont be until Monday or Tuesday of next week. As much as we would all like her to go to the Transplant House we know they need to get all her meds and these persistent issues ironed out. Overall, she is feeling well and we are working on her goals to continue to get her stronger.We are so Blessed that our outcome is as good as it has been with everything she has been through. Thanking God and counting our Blessings every single day!
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 05:41:14 +0000
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