Jason's Update

We haven't told too many people about what's going on with Jason except family and co-workers.  So, Jason had his normal pediatric cardiologist visit with the doctor he's had since he was 2 years old this past December at Shand's in Gainesville.  Him and Ashlyn go together every year and have their appointment together.  At this particular visit, Jason asked who he thought he should start looking at to see since his current doctor is getting older and probably going to retire soon (~85 years old).  He said he wanted Jason to see this one doctor and that she was there that day and he would go get her for him to meet.  Unfortunately, or fortunately, she wasn't available, but her partner was.  On his way to meet Jason he looked at his file quickly and his echo that he had done the year before.  He noticed that his bicuspid valve was dilated and it looked like it was just under 5 cm dilated.  He talked to Jason about this when he met him and they scheduled an MRI to get an exact measurement.

The MRI was done a couple of weeks ago in February.  It showed he had a leak in the valve, but it was only 17%.  Apparently that's good.  If it's under 15% they don't call it a leak, and 15-50% is mild and anything above 50% is moderate/severe.  The dilation on his bicuspid valve, however, was measured at 5 cm and that's usually just past the range where they like to do surgery to keep it from getting any larger.  Really the surgery is to prevent a possible aneurism from happening in the heart, since the dilation continues to grow over the years.  They consider this an elective heart surgery, since it's a prevention surgery.  A good thing that came out of the MRI was that they saw where his surgery was from when he was 4 years old to fix the coarctation of the aorta and it still looked really good!

Jason has a sit down appointment to talk to the heart surgeon, pediatric cardiologist and the cardiologist that specializes in congenital heart defects as an adult (which was the doctor that saw the issue and read the MRI).  It is scheduled for March 19th.  He can get all the questions he has answered hopefully and feel more comfortable. 

We have already tentatively scheduled his surgery appointments for having the catheter done on 5/21 to go in and make sure there's nothing else wrong with his heart as to ensure that the surgery will go smoothly and the actual surgery is tentatively scheduled for 5/23.  We made this schedule so that we could do it right after our Disney cruise (literally the next week) and the kids would be out of school.  His surgery will entail him staying at the hospital for up to a week, but the doctor says at his age and health, he sees Jason getting out in 5 days.  He also does not need to go on coagulants since it's a certain type of surgery.  I believe what the surgery entails is going in through the chest and putting a sleeve around the aortic root on that valve to prevent it from getting any larger.  So from all of the open heart surgeries you could have, this is one of the minor ones.  Because of his age and health, the doctor has really good prognosis for all of this and that's what is important!

I just wanted to let everyone know what was going on, and prayers are always a plus!

Jeff Green on the Celtics had this issue and surgery done.  It explains it and the surgery at this website.