So, lets have the transplant talk. The heart failure team came back by. The Dr said that the reason theyve been going back and forth with her is because they dont want to jump the gun on transplant because when you give someone a transplant youre automatically decreasing their life expectancy. So, when we talk about transplant its always because the persons life is going to be longer and better with a transplant than with their own heart. We already know this and its fair enough. Of course we dont want our daughter to have to have a transplant! I dont want her to have HLHS either, but thats not the case. The dr said that the events of this weekend have made Kimber an even greater risk and seeing her cath and her coronary artery is a game changer. So, we had already done some of Kimbers work up a few weeks ago when they were thinking of listing her before. I promise Im going to get some of this wrong, but Im going to do my best to explain. So, being matched with a heart is more than just having the same blood type. Theres tons of different antibodies that our bodies produce and all of these antibodies from the donors heart and the donees heart have to match (or technically be the opposite I guess). So, the more antibodies that your body has built up, the less hearts are going to be available to you and the harder it is for you to get a match. Good news for Kimber is that she is a newborn and so newborns usually dont have a lot of antibodies built up. Bad news for Kimber is that she has had a Norwood operation, several blood transfusions, and the big one, ECMO, which all expose her to foreign bodies and make her much more likely to have developed a lot of these antibodies, or PRAs as they call them. So, theres always been this issue of whether or not Kimber would even be a good candidate for transplant because hearts her size are hard to come by and because its expected that her PRAs could be pretty high. They finally got Kimbers bloodwork back and does anyone want to guess what hers are??? ZERO!! That right there is a huge MIRACLE. Thank you God! Were still trying to get her to her Glenn because its questionable if she would survive long enough to get to transplant without it. They also said something about trying to do a bypass, which I didnt even know they could do in infants. So, of course the hope is that the Glenn will work, the bypass will work, and Kimber wont need a transplant, but if they cant fix her coronary problem with the Glenn, then they will go ahead and list her. Of course the first hill we have to get over is this infection, so be praying that they find out the source and the antibiotics help her to be able to fight it off. She cant have her Glenn OR be listed for transplant while being sick, and as we all know, with her hearts anatomy she doesnt have a lot of reserve, so any kind of infection is going to be very strenuous for her. And I just breathed for the first time in at least a week.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 01:32:31 +0000