The title of the picture to the right is "Houston Has A Big Heart", and I find that very fitting with everything that has transpired over the past week.
As I mentioned in an early post, my parents flew out to Houston so my dad could have a "procedure" to fix a leak in his heart. As with most things in life, there were a few speed bumps in the process. Once my dad got out there, they ran some tests to get an idea of what they were dealing with before they jump into his heart. When they did these tests they found what turned out to be tissue from one of his original valves that was removed years ago. With this tissue in the heart, the doctors weren't sure if they could preform the procedure as they planned and it looked like we were heading toward another open heart surgery...
So all of the doctors and surgeons out there got together and went over all the results.... and they determined that they could do the original procedure. This was a big relief for us all since we were looking at a couple of days of recovery time vs a couple of months. So they preformed the procedure on Friday afternoon and the doctor was very happy with the results. The leak in my dad's heart was so big that they had to put 2 patches in, and the doctor was thinking about putting in a 3rd, but he didn't want to risk dislodging the first 2 patches. Overall 75% of the leak was blocked by these 2 patches. As my dad's heart accepts the patches they will be coated with blood and actually get a little bigger, so the doctor was very optimistic about the patch blocking even more over the next few weeks.
My dad came home from Houston on Monday, and I am very happy to say that he has been doing extremely well. He sounds better, looks better, and feels better. He is more optimistic about everything, which is really refreshing. I am happy to say that my dad, and Emily's Super Pop will be around for a long time to come...