A wife loses her husband 8 years ago because he was shot in his own backyard by a burglar. She stated that her husband heard a noise in the backyard, as he went to the backyard he was shot to death. The wife was left with two kids a 20 year old and a 10 year old.
The 20 year old had some medical issues and concerns due to being morbidity obese he then decided to do a gastric bypass to lose weight, that later resulted in complications of his intestines. During his evaluation due to his complication it was also found on a routine chest x-ray that he had an enlarged heart that was slowly decompensating. Enlarged hearts is a disease that will eventually cause the heart to fail suddenly. The first line of solution will be the use of medications, and eventually a transplant. A pump can be surgically placed during the process as he waits for a heart. The pump device is literally sewed into the heart that can aid with circulation, this will help with perfusion of organs as he waits for a transplant, and that is to say “if” he gets a transplant. Many people die or decompensate while waiting for a heart transplant by experiencing things such as multi organ failure, or massive infections, blood clots that can result in stroke, etc. Primarily the 20 year old will eventually need a heart transplant to survive. Now he would have dropped dead, if he would have not gotten a routine chest x-ray because enlarged hearts are not routinely diagnosed or examined for.
For the wife, if the death of her husband was not enough, now she faces her 20 year old at the verge of death. The possibility of him getting a heart transplant because of his condition, age, criteria was less than 10 percent.
The 20 year old slowly decompensated and required surgery; the pump device is than placed into his heart, surgery was a success. Now the heart will continue to decompensate and will hope that the pumps pressure is enough to aid with his circulation. Couple of months into having the pump more complications resulted. The pump was failing and had clots. Clots occur due to poor circulation or stagnate blood. As clots travel in the blood stream, it can travel and get lodge in an artery or vein as it gets narrower. And once it clogs the circulation tissue tends to die because no oxygen is being delivered and waste products are not be extracted. Now, depending on its location varies with the severity of symptoms. For example if it happens in the brain, a stroke can result, or if it happens in a limb and the clot is not dislodge the possibility of losing a limb is a possibility. A clot in the limbs is what happened in the 20 year old case. He was place on more aggressive medication to break up the clot, but this patient has been on clot prevention therapy and sometimes clots or unavoidable and can occur at any given time.
The clots were severe, and the patient needed more circulation that the pump can offer to prevent further complication, what he needed was the type of circulation that a normal healthy heart can offer. Later, the pump was failing due to the clots. He was later given 24 hours of expected life if he did not receive a heart within 24 hours.
In the morning, the family sits in the room patient awaiting any news, spending quality time with the 20 year old. The transplant coordinator walks into the room. Everyone sits at the edge of their chair to see what was going to be said, the transplant coordinator goes into the room and walks up to the patient and whispers in his ear, the patient suddenly drops into tears and cries.
The patient speaks with tears to his mom, “mom, they got me a heart”, the whole family fall into tears of joy. Patient was than prepared and wheeled into surgery promptly after, What a day!
