cardiology update

pete had his 1st follow-up with the cardiologist today. before i write about that, i think it's important to explain what actually happened to pete on the night of the incident. this is the best explanation that any doctor has been able to give me, but even they don't know exactly why this happened to pete and they said they will probably never know. i will try to explain the best i can with my lack of medical knowledge and vocabulary; for crying out loud, i had to have a medical translator through all of this! thanks, cydney. :)

pete did not have a heart attack. he had a cardiac arrest. they are different things. a heart attack is damage to the heart muscle usually from a lack of blood flow within the heart. the lack of blood flow during a heart attack is usually caused by some type of blockage to the arteries. the heart muscle begins to die or starve to death, and this death is what causes the chest pain. just to clarify again, pete did not have a heart attack. his heart and arteries were perfectly clean which is one of the signs it was not a heart attack. he had a cardiac arrest. a cardiac arrest happens when the heart stops pumping blood. when the heart stops pumping the blood pressure drops and is unable to pump blood to the rest of the body. there are several reasons the heart could stop pumping blood. sometimes the heart is extremely weak and begins to just quiver uselessly instead of pumping. it might also start racing so fast (fibrillation) that it can no longer fill with blood. cardiac arrests can be caused by heart disease, but they can also occur without any unknown cause. with pete, we are in the "unknown cause" category.

pete's story... the theory has been relatively the same from every doctor that has cared for pete. we know pete has had an abnormal arrhythmia maybe his whole life. that means he has an irregular heart beat. he has always felt like his heart is racing and beating out of control. he actually saw a doctor about it almost a year ago, but they couldn't detect anything at that time so they wrote it off as mini anxiety attacks. pete and i were not convinced by that diagnosis. honestly, pete having anxiety attacks???? hard to believe by anyone who knows him well. we didn't know what else to do, so we did nothing.

what is suspected to have happened that night was pete went to bed feeling normal; at least he did not indicate that his heart was racing, and he can't remember now what he was feeling that night. they believe his heart started beating in that abnormal arrhythmia which caused him to go into ventricular fibrillation (V-Fib). V-Fib is an erratic, disorganized firing of impulses from the ventricles. the ventricles quiver and are unable to contract and pump blood to the body. at that time he was considered to be having a cardiac arrest, and the only treatment is CPR and defibrillation (this shocks the heart back into a normal rhythm) as soon as possible. thankfully he had both. i began administering CPR approximately 3 minutes upon knowing something was wrong. he was being defibrillated (shocked) probably 8-9 minutes from the time i knew something was wrong. i thought that was pretty hopeful; it all seemed quick to me, but the doctors were not convinced at the time that that would be enough. i was confused until i read this on the american heart website: "Brain death and permanent death start to occur in just 4 to 6 minutes after someone experiences cardiac arrest. A victim's chances of survival are reduced by 7 to 10 percent with every minute that passes without CPR and defibrillation. Few attempts at resuscitation succeed after 10 minutes." i certainly realized how lucky we were that the outcome was so positive for us.

the follow-up today didn't necessarily give us more answers about why this happened than we got in the hospital. we were certain that it was genetic since his dad experienced the same thing at age 49 and died from it eventually. however, no doctor is certain that it is genetic. they believe it could be random just as much as it could be genetic. they said at this point there has not been any abnormal symptoms from any test that he had through all of this that would indicate that it was genetic. we could have genetic testing done, but it is VERY expensive, and if it was genetic it wouldn't change the treatment. we have opted to not have the testing done especially since he has the defibrillator. they talked to us about warning signs to watch for in our children to rule out if they have been passed a defective gene, but so far so good there.

they did check his defibrillator settings today. they informed us that the heart rate level that the device was set at before receiving a shock is only at 170 (heart rate). they said they set it so low because he was still having a rapid heartbeat while he was in the hospital. now we will be fine tuning the settings since the device did not indicate that he has continued to have a rapid heartbeat. over the next 4-6 weeks he needs to have at least 2 normal workouts so they can determine a normal heartbeat for him during exercise. they expect that it will be reset to 190 or 200. the device will pace his heart if it goes higher than this and shock him if the device can't pace the rate out. we are just hoping that he doesn't get a shock during those first few work-outs. thankfully it's not dangerous if he does. they said it will feel like a really hard kick in the chest, but he should be fine.

i know that was a lot of information. i hadn't intended to write that much, but i realized the more i wrote the more i wanted things documented for us. we feel very confident after this appointment that he will not be having heart problems again. there may be a little fine tuning with his device, but once that is done he will be just as physically active as he was before and a whole lot safer now being that active. this appointment definitely gave me closure to that part of this scary ordeal.

cardiology.... check. now moving onto neuropsych.... i know that will check eventually, too. we are still feeling blessed everyday.