Despite how well Brady is doing, we have visited two ER's in the first week of being home. The first trip was to the American Fork Hospital. Brady's nose started to bleed his first Saturday home around 9 pm. We went through our normal routines of plugging it up and waiting for it to stop. After an hour and a half we started to get serious and squeezed the nose and applied ice. When that did not stop it I tried a few oils and the nose kept on bleeding. Katie and Scott gave up waiting for it to stop by 11:30 and went to bed, since they were both mostly asleep before that. By midnight there was no end in sight. Brady and I said a prayer and asked for it to stop or if he needed to go to the ER that it would be apparent. Well, the nose plugs kept getting saturated with blood so off to the ER we went to get his nose cauterized. By the time we made it to the ER Brady's nose had been bleeding for 3 1/2 hours. The doctor first had to stop the bleed by stuffing his nose with a cotton ball soaked in Lidocaine and Afrin nasal spray. The doctor then put on a nose plug and left it up for about 20 minutes.
After about twenty minutes the doctor returned, suctioned his nose and determined where the bleed was coming from. The bleed was about the size of a pinky finger tip. The doctor then proceeded to stick up match-like sticks to burn the area that was bleeding. By this time it was 2:30 am and we were both exhausted. The ER is an exciting place on a Saturday night. There was a patient screaming at the top of her lungs, "Stop that!" "Leave me alone!" Brady and I had quite a laugh because we imagined that would be his sister Payton if she had to go to the ER. She does not like anything to do with hospitals. It turns out the lady screaming was incredibly intoxicated and the police brought her to the ER because they didn't have anywhere else to take her. She did not want to be there, hence the yelling.
Following this incident the week was fairly calm. Brady seemed to be short of breath always and he was incredibly itchy on the Friday. I called up to the surgeon's office to get some input. They were concerned that he was short of breath so we were sent for a chest x-ray to check for pleural effusion. Before we even made it home from the hospital we were called to say the x-ray looked better than it did a week ago, so it was not pleural effusion. They were puzzled as to why he would be so itchy. He was told to take Benadryl and that seemed to help. The itchiness was gone by Saturday.
On Sunday we felt Brady was well enough to attend church and well on his way to a full recovery. Sometime during the third hour Brady started to not feel well, but he didn't tell anybody anything about how he was feeling. He found me after church and told me he didn't feel well. Something didn't feel right. He was kind of panicking, which in turn sent me into full "panic mode". We arrived home and I hooked him to his pulse oximeter (yes we have a pulse oximeter) and listened to his heart. The pulse ox machine was indicating his heart rate was 51 bpm. His pace maker is supposed to kick in at 60 bpm so we shouldn't ever see his heart rate below 60 bpm. I checked his rate myself by listening to his heart through the stethoscope (yes we have a stethoscope) and counting beats for a minute, and sure enough I counted 52 bpm. I called up to Primary's to get input and while I was on the phone his heart jumped into the 100's, then back into the 70's, then to 129 and Brady is saying he doesn't feel very well. We quickly got a bowl for him and he threw up. We were then instructed by the cardiologist on the phone that we need to get him to the hospital. We had Addison and Payton go to our friends house as we made the trip north to the ER.
Brady received great care at the hospital, but in the end they could not figure out what happened. His heart was beating much faster than normal, but we didn't see the erratic heart rate like we were seeing at home. He was monitored for a few hours, his pacemaker was checked and then we were sent home with a holter monitor.
A few days later Brady had his post surgery appointment where he checked out great. The holter monitor revealed nothing significant, so Brady's episode on the Sunday was a mystery. This was very frustrating to have the doctors dismiss something that was so scary for me to watch happen, but since they didn't see it occur then they couldn't really say what happened. I would have appreciated something like, "Arrhythmia's are typical after heart surgery, but it seems like he is okay now." But the interrogation of the pace maker revealed that his heart rate never dropped below 60, which means I couldn't have actually counted 52 beats. One of the doctors we saw on the Sunday said that he believed me, but just couldn't explain the discrepancy. Since all the numbers pointed to him being well, the doctors cleared him for school the next day if we wanted. Given we were only three days out from the Sunday's incident I was not willing to let him go so soon. We worked the next few days on getting him caught up on all his school work and planned to send him back the following week.
Three weeks post surgery Brady was back at school. He received a warm welcome back from his class with a doorway decorated with balloons and a welcome back sign. Could Brady have asked for a better teacher? I think not.
As Brady is well on his way to a full recovery I have tried to return to normal living. I had several really hard days two weeks ago right after the second ER trip. After a talk with a close Heart Mom friend I was able to recognize that I was stressing over my fears of the unknown and the "what ifs". Living with a heart child is not an easy thing, wondering if his heart will stop working properly, will he catch an illness he can't fight, will he gain weight, will he grow or will he die because of something you have missed. I really struggled with these and many other fears when Brady was a baby and I ended up in therapy to help recognize that these thoughts are just fears. Recently I was reminded that I needed to return to living in the present and not worrying about what might happen. Once I was able to make the perspective switch I was much happier and found joy in daily living again. From here on we will deal with challenges as they arise and will refrain from mentally dealing with the challenges that have not and may never happen.
