Puzzled Cardiologists

Rebecca has cardiologists scratching their heads here. From her echo Wednesday they are puzzled as to why her cardiac ventricles continue to thicken, therefore shrinking the chamber size. The attending on this week said he has never seen such rapidly thickening. Yesterday morning he and another cardiologist went back and reviewed all 20 prior echocardiograms back to her date of birth. They were just stepping back and looking at everything as a whole to see if they could notice anything. They notice the biggest difference in mid May. Today they are going to do some more cultures, and get genetics involved to see if there is anything that has been overlooked. With her ventricles thickened and chamber smaller the blood backs up in to the atrium. If it can't get into the atrium it backs up in the vessels and stays in the body causing the swelling. They continue to remove the fluid with dialysis which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Because of the inconsistency of the dialysis they are still considering a surgically placed PD catheter. They have had to back off on the amount they are taking off of her because of the small ventricular chamber. If they remove too much the chamber cannot fill like it needs to and her blood pressure suffers. Now they are just trying to take off as much as they are putting in. Yesterday and overnight she had to get several rounds of blood and other fluids to help her blood pressure. This may be partly because they stopped her epinephrine. They are doing a head and kidney ultrasound right now to make sure all of the blood and fluids they are having to give her are not going somewhere they shouldn't. At this point I would say she's hanging in there. She's obviously a fighter like her twin so we know she can do it. 

We met my mom near Louisville yesterday morning so Jessica could go home for the recital tonight. Ashley, Deacon, Katelyn and Kenlee all came along with her. Our rendezvous point was Dairy Queen in New Albany. We managed to avoid the ice cream... sort of. When I got back to Cincinnati I met Jessica's cousin Joey that came down from Indy for the day to visit. We both pulled into the RMH at the exact time, which was kinda weird.