Sacred Hearts Club

****Warning-- This might be a boring post--- no promises though****

So, apparently, I'm defective. It isn't enough to get on Ripley's Believe it or Not or join the circus (these are only faint dreams I have, when my kids go for 12 hours straight torturing themselves, each other, me and the bra lady at JC Penneys), but I'm defective enough to require a bit of outpatient surgery and get more sympathy from my blurkers out there.

Shall I explain in the only way I know how? Long and tedious? Let's begin with a little inner ear test my ENT did. I won't go into details of that test, but the result was that my inner ear responses mimicked those of an 80 year old with balance problems. No wonder I'm dizzy and have to try not to fall off the toilet or out of the shower some days! So the ENT wanted to rule out a hole in my heart. He didn't think anything would show. My MRI was clean and holes in the heart can cause spirts of blood to attack the brain leaving little white spots of scaring. I was in the clear there, but he wanted to be sure the hole in the heart thing wasn't there. After the appointment, armed with numerous referrals for cardio doctors and more balancing tests, I called my mom. She flippantly says, "You know, I have a hole in my heart." WHAT?!? Oh, well that would have been a good thing to tell the doctor.

Now this is where we learn that even though I'm indulging in such sinful practices as drinking Diet Dr. Pepper daily and watching 40 Greatest Reality TV Moments 2 (and enjoying too much the charm school tidbits) I am still intune with the spirit. When the Dr. mentioned this hole in the heart condition and my mom mentions she has it, all other testing left my mind and I KNEW this was the path to pursue. So I focused on getting things going with insurance and making the appointment. Then I tried to enjoy my week in Casper all the while worrying if my heart was going to explode! I know my leanings towards the dramatic is a shock for you, but bear with me.

My test was Monday. I had a brain doppler. It's kind of cool, they have a machine that sends waves to the artery in your brain, then they put bubbled saline into your vein and watch to see if any bubbles end up in your brain. They do one bubble hit at rest, one while bearing down (like I'm trying to poop) and one while breathing hard into a tube. At rest, the bubbles are filtered nicely through my lungs, but at exertion, the bubbles go straight to my brain. HUH? The next test was a heart ultrasound. I must admit, I would much rather had a pregnancy ultrasound, but I digress, I was pretty proud of seeing my heart beating. Looked good, good size, good movement, good blood flow. Then the bubbles are injected again. At rest we saw a few bubbles switch sides, at excertion a huge cloud of bubbles entered the wrong side of my heart.

What does this mean? PFO. You don't know what that is? You can look it up here.

PFO is dangerous because it lets unclean blood (blood which is filtered through the lungs removing bad stuff and illiminating clots) directly into the blood stream and into the brain. This can cause stroke. In fact, the pamphlet they gave me said that 40% of all strokes were of unknown cause, but we now know that most of these may be caused by PFO. And after a first stroke due to PFO, 1/2 of patients still have moderate to severe disability after 1 year. And repeat strokes are more common with patients with leg clots, migraines, septal aneurysm and large PFO shunting (this is when the hole is big and lets bad blood in at rest too).

So the good news is that 1 person in five have this defect. Well, it's good news to me, maybe not you. But most adults don't know they have it and NEVER have symptoms or problems. The reason I'm concerned is because I'm obviously having dizziness problems along with a few other neurological indicators. I also have a family history of stroke in that my maternal grandmother died at 39 of a massive stroke. My mother has a hole in her heart. So, I'm going to get this thing fixed. The procedure is interesting. You can read about it in the link above.

I don't know why I had vertigo twice in 6 months. I don't even know if plugging this hole will stop all my dizziness and balance problems. What I do know is that if I had to suffer all that just to know about this defect, so I could get it fixed and prevent leaving my husband and children too soon, I don't regret one minute of it. As always, I know that the Lord works in ways that lead us to where we need to be. He knows us and loves us. I see His hand more and more in the workings of my life.