Jack Jensen's Blog: Cardiology Results

Friday, August 1, 2008

Cardiology Results

Jack's cardiologist from Johns Hopkins called me this afternoon with the results of his 24hr monitoring. The reason we did this was because they felt he was having some sort of arrhythmia of his heart and we needed to know the frequency with which this was happening and the type of premature contraction, premature atrial contractions (PACs) or premature ventricular contractions (PVCs). Beforehand the doctor said that the PVCs would be more worrisome then PACs.

They measured a total of 174,000 beats over 24 hrs and 21,000 of those were PVCs. That works out to 12% of his heartbeats; ie: it's a frequent event. This wasn't the news we wanted but the cardiologist said that 12% wasn't cause for great concern. If he gets to around 20% then it's pretty bad. The good news is that he wasn't having a run of PVCs but instead they were randomly dispersed. I guess if you have multiple PVCs in a row the heart can have trouble pumping blood out to the body and you can get light headed and/or pass out. To be honest here, I don't know a whole lot about this stuff so I'm trying to read what I can and become more educated.

We don't know what the cause of the PVCs are. Since he had them in the NICU it likely wasn't caused by his pericardial effusion after his reherniation surgery in December. There is also no plan to treat it right now since it's not at any kind of dangerous level. The plan is that we have to monitor Jack with the 24 hr holter monitor in 6 months. Hopefully that will tell us if it's improving or getting worse. We didn't discuss any long term stuff with the cardiologist. I think he wants to take it one step at a time and right now he's not overly concerned but it is something we will have to monitor closely.

On a brighter note, we took Jack shopping tonight. James' coworkers gave him a gift card for Target as a belated baby gift so we let Jack pick out some toys. We held different ones out and let him try them out. He really liked the one where you press a button or pull a knob and a toy pops up. We got him that and some more books. He actually licked his lips when he saw the board books! He will eat that but not his baby food. Crazy boy!

Here's a photo of him in the cart (sorry for the bad resolution - I took it with my phone!). We bought him a cart liner for our next trip out.

3 comments:

Fer said...: Vicki, I'm sorry about the news, but hopefully in 6 months while they are doing his study, everything will look better :)

My prayers are always with you and your family.; August 1, 2008 at 9:16 PM
Jen said...: Sorry it wasn't the news we were all hoping for. Praying it's better in 6 months. Maybe Jack got "the big D" from all that board book fiber! Glad he is feeling better.

Jen Miller; August 1, 2008 at 10:45 PM
Amber said...: I will be praying for Jack. Hopefully in six months the probally with have fixed itself.

Amber
Owain's mommy LCDH; August 4, 2008 at 3:36 PM

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Jack's Diagnosis and Recovery

At our 19 week ultrasound Jack was diagnosed with CDH. One week later James and I went to Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. for more extensive analysis. We had a fetal MRI and saw that his hernia was on the left side (the most common) and at that time his liver was 'up' or in his chest. His heart was pushed to the right in his chest and he had a normal sized right lung and a very small left lung (about 1/5 the normal size). Overall his CDH was classified as severe with a Lung to Head (LHR) ratio of 0.8. His echocardiogram showed that his heart was beating strong and there was no underlying congenital heart defect. His amnio was also normal. The prognosis was 20-50% chance of survival at birth. The struggle we faced with this diagnosis was that there is little correlation between prenatal diagnostic test results and outcome at birth. Some babies with mild defects do poorly and some with severe defects pull through and do very well. All we could do was try to be optimistic and hope and pray that Jack would be a strong baby and fight hard. On August 20, 2007 John Verner Jensen "Jack" was born by C-section at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He weighed 6 pounds 11 ounces and was 20 inches long. Within hours of birth he was placed on ECMO (heart-lung bypass). He had a 10 day run on ECMO and went to his hernia repair surgery on this machine. He was missing 90% of his left diaphragm, had his entire stomach, spleen, and parts of his small and large intestines and liver in his chest and he required a gortex patch. Jack came out of surgery off ECMO but with the cannulas still in place until later that night. He had a really hard night after surgery and we nearly lost him. We were later told his blood gases should have been unsurvivable and that it was pure will and not medicine that saved him. After 81 days in hospital we brought Jack home breathing room air and needing only an NG (naso-gastric) feeding tube. After 27 days home he reherniated and we had to go back for emergency surgery at Johns Hopkins. His awesome surgeons literally patched him back up and after another 16 days in hospital he returned home on Dec 21, 2007 - just in time for his first Christmas. Since then Jack has tackled his eating issues and is NG-tube free! He does not require any medication. We are extremely grateful for his incredible medical team and all his friends and family for their support, kind words, thoughts and prayers.

Jack's CarePage chronicles his day-to-day journey from diagnosis to approximately 6 months old (before we started blogging). See the link below.