Cardiology Debate

We received a call from Dr. J at TCH last night with their recommendations for Hudson's heart situation. He said that Hudson's mitral valve is not quite at the absolutely need to repair stage...yet. In some cases, the valve doesn't get worse. The progression that Hudson's valve has shown leads him to believe that it probably will, but they have to wait and see if that turns out to be the case, rather than jumping into an OHS. I agree with this completely.
As for the ASD, he feels that we should wait to close it, partly because Hudson isn't overly symptomatic from it, and also because if we do close it and then Hudson requires a valve repair, the closure device being in his heart adds another element to the valve repair, it complicates it a little. Bottom line, he feels Hudson will probably need both fixed at a later date.

Fast forward to today. We had an appointment with Hudson's regular cardiologist at CMHH. She feels that he is definitely more symptomatic than 3 months ago when we saw her last. He is having increased swelling, increased fatigue, he's lost weight, his echo shows more enlargement, and we now have the addition of liver involvement. His liver is enlarged from excess fluid. We discussed what Dr. J from TCH recommended, but she feels that he needs his ASD closed. From a mito standpoint, she said his body isn't keeping up. The new liver issue scares me completely. So she is going to discuss his case Monday at the surgical conference and will call us next week to let us know what the plan is. More waiting :( In the meantime, she upped his dose of his ACE inhibitor, Hudson got lots of labs drawn to assess liver function more clearly, and we discussed putting him on a diuretic. This is tricky with mito and his fluid requirements though, so she's going to give that one some thought. We have an appointment Friday with GI and she instructed us to discuss options for getting weight on him. How we are going to accomplish this with a kid who doesn't tolerate volume well I don't know. Hopefully we'll all be able to come up with some good options for our sweet little Huddy.