Draft Day...

If you read yesterday's post, we left off with Lauren having been diagnosed with a retinal artery occlusion.  Her ophthalmologist had determined that a microclot got stuck in a tiny artery causing her to have a mini-stroke in her left eye and resulting in some blurriness of vision. Though we now knew what had happened, we still didn't know why it had happened or if there was a chance for it to happen again.  Our next move was to assemble a team of doctors to get down to the nitty gritty and find a diagnosis.

In case you don't get the "Nitty Gritty" reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rdCQjfN2CE

The next few days I kind of felt like I was a General Manager for an NFL team and it was draft day. With the help of Dr. Hilgers (the OB), we had to go about finding a cardiologist, a neurologist, and a maternal fetal medicine specialist (I didn't even know that this specialty existed before this) to join our team and figure out what the source of Lauren's problems were.  This process turned into quite the ordeal.  Not only did we have to find doctors that would accept our insurance, but then we had to get each doctor to sign off and actually accept Lauren as a patient.  This meant that each doctor wanted to review Lauren's medical records before they would accept her as a patient.

At first we didn't think this would be a big deal because each doctor said that they would request the records, review them, and then get back to us, but as any of you that have dealt with this type of situation before might have guessed, records never were sent and therefore never reviewed. We ended up having to round up all of the records ourselves in order to get them to the appropriate places.  Once this was done, then the waiting game began.  This in itself was rather frustrating because we still didn't know if Lauren was at risk of throwing another clot.  We figured that the records review would just be a formality, but that turned out to not be the case.  For whatever reason, we actually had a couple doctors deny her as a patient which meant that we had to start the entire process over again.

It ended up taking almost a month to finally get Lauren in to see all of the different specialists.  Each specialist ran their own battery of tests to try to nail down the ultimate cause of all of Lauren's problems.  This post would never end if I went through explaining all of the test that Lauren had to undergo so I'll just fast forward to the diagnosis.

If you remember from yesterday's post, I told you that Dr. Chang, the ophthalmologist, actually diagnosed Lauren over the phone the day of the stroke.  Of course, at the time we had no way of knowing if it was an accurate diagnosis, but it ended up that he was right all along.  Lauren was diagnosed with a large grade PFO (Patent Ovale Foramen).  In short, a PFO is a small hole in the heart that didn't close the way it should after birth.  It's actually fairly common, about 20% of the population has them and just never know it.  PFOs very rarely cause any problems, but unfortunately for Lauren, a complication arises. The combination of a large grade PFO and the increased blood volume/hyper-coagulation from being pregnant ended up to be the perfect recipe for a much more eventful pregnancy than we would have hoped for.

The doctors believe that the microclot was produced as a byproduct of all of the changes going on in Lauren's body due to the pregnancy.  Instead of continuing through the venous system to the lungs where it could get filtered out, the clot then got very sneaky, sneaky and snuck through the PFO into Lauren's arterial system where it eventually made its way to her eye.  Because the PFO was considered to be large grade, the neurologist decided to change Lauren from the aspirin therapy to a drug called Lovenox.

The positive to changing over to Lovenox is that it does not cross the placenta so there is no risk of it affecting the baby in anyway.  But as seems to be par for this course, with every positive comes a couple negatives.  Lovenox can only be taken as an injection so Lauren now has to give herself a shot twice a day until 6 weeks after the baby is born.  Needless to say, she wasn't too thrilled about having to inject herself almost 400 times and I can't blame her.  The other negative is that Lovenox can really complicate the delivery process because it is a blood thinner.  Unless Lauren is able to get off the drug at least 24 hours before the delivery, she will not have the option of an epidural and any type of c-section could prove to be troublesome as well.  (I'm now trying to figure out a way to get the baby to call ahead and make a reservation so that Lauren can stop the Lovenox 24 hours in advance. Right now the leading idea in the clubhouse is to teach the baby Morse Code so that he/she can send us a series of kicks 24 hours before his/her planned appearance.  All suggestions are welcome...)

I need to wrap up this post because it's getting long and I want you all to keep coming back, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out one of the major ways that God has provided throughout this process.  We are absolutely positive that God has placed each of our doctors in our lives for a specific reason.  Both Lauren's OB and ophthalmologist ended up being very strong Christians that have not only have provided top notch care, but have committed to praying for us as well.  That commitment means more to us than anything that either of them could ever do medically.

You'll also remember the saga I described of trying to get doctors to accept Lauren as a patient.  All of the doctors that refused Lauren as a patient happened to be neurologists.  Looking back, I now know that this was God working to get us with the right doctor.  The neurologist that we finally ended up seeing actually is in the middle of doing research over PFOs and their long-term effects. Think about that for a second.  A neurologist, a doctor that focuses on the brain, is doing research on a defect in the heart.  More specifically, he is doing research on how clots passing through PFOs can cause strokes.  We could not have found a more perfect doctor for Lauren and his research has already affected changes in how Lauren is being treated.  He is absolutely a Godsend and we are so thankful that we were able to draft him to our team.  More tomorrow...

In Him,
Chad