John Parker's Heart

John Parker will be having heart surgery this Friday at 6 am at Vanderbilt Children's. The procedure will be performed in the cath lab...thus it is NOT an open-heart surgery. We are not discussing this with John Parker until after school on Thursday.

Here is a history of John Parker to catch you up. John Parker was born with a congenital heart defect called Tetrology of Fallot. He had an open-heart surgery in Michigan that repaired most of this defect when he was 3 months old. At one year of age, Dr. Doyle, at Vanderbilt, placed a stent into John Parker's left pulmonary artery because it was so stenotic (closed or small) that blood flow was essentially 0%. Then at one-and-a-half-years-old, Dr. Doyle, opened the stent to make it bigger. We got to 30% which was a GREAT success. Most of us have 40% of our blood flowing to our left lung and 60% to our right. Thus 30% for John Parker was wonderful.

We went for our 6 month cardio check up on Monday and based upon the lung scan that we did in March and the eco, Dr. Parra feels like an intervention now is worth it. Dr. Parra estimated a 4% drop to 26% which does not sound like a lot but is significant in this respect. Once the blood flow starts to diminish, it does so more rapidly. Dr. Doyle (our interventionist) estimates that the stent is around 7mm in size right now and he wants to get it to 10mm (which will max out this stent but should carry John Parker longer before planning on our second open heart surgery). So, John Parker will be taken to the Cath Lab on Friday morning where Dr. Doyle will insert a catheter through either John Parker's groin or neck in order to reach the stent in the left pulmonary artery. He will inflate a balloon to see if he can make the stent bigger. We are the first case of the day. After recovery, John Parker will be admitted and we will spend the night and come home on Saturday.

We appreciate your thoughts and prayers. I will send an email and blog post with the results once John Parker is awake on Friday.