Timothy Update

The device in the side of Tim's neck is an external temporary pacemaker.

After 10 long days and three surgeries, Tim is home. We had an excellent experience at Duke. The nurses and staff were just wonderful. Considering how short staffed they were, we still received the most caring and professional support. There were many days when the goal was just to keep Tim healthy and wait until the lead extraction surgery could be planned and scheduled. David or I stayed with Tim 24 hours a day in the hospital for the entire stay.

Dear Husband came and relieved me for two days so I could go home and tend the home fires. It is an 8 hour round trip between Duke hospital and home, so I only left the hospital once. They two of them had lots of fun together watching horror films on the science fiction channel. 

Tim was a model patient and he was always polite and cooperative with the nurses. Even when he was coming out of anesthesia, his manners shined through. He had the nurses completely charmed. If only there would have been an ice cream machine on the unit, he would have been spoiled by those nurses. However, it was a cardiac unit and all the food was rather healthy. The nurses were also shocked that he ordered broccoli (his favorite vegetable) with almost every meal and actually ate it.

The final surgery was one of the most complicated of Tim's life. The doctor listed off a rather long list of concerns, but he also stated that they had lots of planning time and his team was hand picked. They took every precaution and had a host of backup plans. One of those plans was to have two teams in the operating room for his final surgery. Team A did the laser extraction and placement of the new leads. Team B (a vascular cardiac team) was scrubbed in and on standby in the operating room in case there were complications and they needed to do open heart surgery. As Dr. Hegland (Team A surgeon) said, "Hopefully, we will keep Team B standing around being bored". Fortunately, Team B did end up just standing around in the operating room. The surgery took almost 6 hours (two hours more than expected), but that was simply because they had to go very slowly and use multiple tools to extract the deteriorating leads. They also had to go in from multiple sites so he has a new host of battle scars. We are so grateful and blessed that everything went so well. They never could get his heart to show successful beats over 30 beats per minute (under the pacemaker), so he is once again fully pacemaker dependent. He has spent much of his life in this condition, but in recent years had a higher heart rate so that he wouldn't be in critical condition if his pacemaker failed. Unfortunately, that is not currently the case. They do not know if his heart will recover over time and start having more successful beats as it did after past surgeries. It could be years before he has heart function improvement. It is amazing and awe inspiring what they can do these days.

We even were released in time to beat a huge snow storm home. This is what our back yard looked like just hours after we arrived home and it kept snowing for about 7 more hours. 

Blessings, Dawn