Life as a Wife

The point of entry in Robert’s groin has healed, the pressure dressing has been removed, and we have been able to hold Robert for a little while. We’re trying to get him to wake up so we can feed him before we completely run out of energy and have to go back to our room to sleep.

As I mentioned earlier, Dr. Gillespie said, almost as an afterthought, that the amount of leaking of Robert’s repaired valve that he was seeing in the images was significantly higher than he would have liked, but that it doesn’t sound like there is that much leaking when listening to his heart. A third indicator of aortic valve leakage is the blood pressure readings. According to his nurse and the attending CICU physician, patients with significant valve leakage generally have a larger “gap” between the upper and lower numbers when reading blood pressure. All of Robert’s hourly readings have been encouragingly close together. In fact, Robert’s nurse said that his blood pressure readings look like that of a normal healthy heart.

So out of the three indicators of aortic valve leakage, two of the three indicate less leakage than originally thought, and the third has been acknowledged to be inaccurate in many instances. This is very encouraging to us and we are fervently praying that when his cardiologist does another echo in the morning, it will reveal that Robert in fact has much less leakage than originally thought.

We are trying not to get our hopes up too much, but we can’t help but be excited for the possibility. Our hope is in the Lord who made heaven and earth. And our Lord can stop the excess leaking of a mere aortic valve. Please ask Him to do so, and to give strength to Robert and his parents.

On behalf of the latter, goodnight and we’ll see how the little man is doing in the morning.