Wednesday 25th April 2012

Well I’m afraid things are going from bad to worse for us. We want to know what Chinaman we’ve killed but decided it must have been a whole village! Not good news at all regarding Murray, as it's much more serious than we thought. He had an echo on Tuesday and it showed thickening of the heart wall. The specialist saw us today and said the official term is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Apparently it’s a congenital heart condition, so it may have been inherited by abnormal genes or his DNA could just have mutated the genes. Dr Tan said that he’s still not quite sure how we will proceed with treatment for Murray as he is relatively young (45) and he could potentially be at risk of sudden cardiac death based on the events that took place. He wanted to see me to get my first hand version of Murray’s episode (I’ve kept missing him when he came for rounds very early each morning), so that he could put all the pieces of the puzzle together. He wants to get an MRI of the heart done as this will show any scarring of the heart muscle that the echo can’t show. If there is scarring then Dr Tan will go ahead with inserting an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) – this will mean his heart will get kick started automatically if he has another cardiac attack. If there is no scarring, then he’ll have a rethink about the way to proceed as putting an ICD in is basically for life. The other option is treating with medication and monitoring quite closely, however he runs the chance of having an attack when no one is around to help him. So as if all of that isn’t bad enough news, as I was sat waiting to see Dr Tan on Tuesday afternoon, I received a call from Luke saying the house had been broken into! Luke had arrived home from uni and upon reflection we think his noisy car may have disturbed them as they didn’t fully complete attacking my jewellery and had only got to one of Amy’s drawers. Luckily being school holidays, Amy was out of the house at her cousins (although now freaking out about “what if” she had been home). It is obviously kids as they have taken Luke’s x-box / controllers / and about 60 games that he’d collected over the years. They’ve gone through all his drawers, dumping the clothes on the bed and taken a money box full of $100 in $1 coins and other collectable coins he had. They’ve cleaned out the drawer in the family room of x-box games but left the wii and wii games (fussy robbers). In my room they were just looking for money – they’ve obviously looked under the mattress and pulled out all our drawers/clothes then found my hiding stash of jewellery. I don’t know that I have that much expensive jewellery (never had anything valued) but certainly lots of sentimental items gone (mainly gold that might be sold easily). They only took a few things from my actual jewellery box so that’s why we think they may have been interrupted. They’ve taken lots of other things like my laptop, Amy’s good digital camera, hard drive and all the spare keys hanging on the rack. This meant changing house locks and garage door locks last night. With the public holiday today, I haven’t had chance to sort out what we are going to do about changing locks for cars. Murray rides a scooter and they took his backpack which contained a full set of keys as well as the spares off the rack so we don’t actually have a key at all for the bike. So at this stage, we need to wait for a spot for the MRI at one of the private hospitals (hopefully by the end of this week) and if Murray gets the ICD (this would more than likely happen next week). It’s actually not a big procedure and from reading information he should be able to go back to work after a week or so. It’s obviously just a change for life that he’ll have to get used to. So I’ll keep you updated about where to from here once we know anything else.

Monday 23rd April 2012

Luke is going really well - still having the odd day of sickness due to nausea or headaches caused by the continuing chemo and his liver function tests still keep going high so I'm not convinced that the dosages are totally correct yet. He's busy doing Uni assignments and has exams towards the end of May. Still working 3 days per week at DAFF and enjoying it. Especially the money he is saving towards a new car. He went along to an awards ceremony a few weeks ago to be presented with the awards I mentioned in the lat post. His grandma, grandad, nan and aunt as the cheering squad! (Unfortunately Murray and I had work commitments that we couldn't get out of). Unfortunately The Elton's took another hit the other night. On Friday night I went to go to bed at around 11.30pm and Murray had already fallen asleep watching TV. I woke him up and told him to get to bed properly. He took his IPAD out to the lounge to put on charge and then went to the toilet. As he was sat there he said he suddenly felt overwhelmed with nausea. I walked into the ensuite to see if he needed a bucket or something and he went all strange. His eyes were fixated and not moving and I couldn't get any verbal responses out of him other than moaning. I assumed it was a stroke or something and raced for the phone to call an ambulance. This episode lasted for about a minute and then he came out of it and said he was okay and went to get off the toilet. I helped him up and guided him towards the bed, whilst continuing to talk to the ambulance operator and then he slipped from my grip and fainted hitting his head on the wall on the way down. He wasn't unconscious and started arguing with me about who I was on the phone to and that he was okay. He was really clammy and sweaty but managed to sit up after a short while. The ambulance operator said he would still send someone around to check him out. The last thing Murray remembers is going to the toilet and feeling sick and then lying on the floor - he doesn't remember anything about he time in between. The ambulance officers started saying it might be a virus, or that he got up too quickly and just fainted. They then did an ECG and repeated this with a more involved ECG and said he had earnt a trip to the hospital! Once in the hospital they ran blood tests and did another ECG which showed the same variants in the Q waves and T waves, indicating an irregular heart rhythm and they were quite concerned. When the blood tests came back they said the blood enzymes indicated that a heart attack had occurred and that he would need to stay in for more tests. They took more blood samples about 4 hours later and these still showed high levels pointing towards a heart attack but they were confused as he had no other symptoms of a heart attack. Around 6am Murray was taken up to the coronary care unit where he was told he would see a specialist that morning. The specialist came and after looking at his ECG and blood results, he told Murray they'd need to monitor him and run more tests and that he'd be in possibly overnight or a few days. Unfortunately for Murray, who by the time we got into hospital was perfectly fine and frustrated,it meant missing out on his parents 50th wedding anniversary party on the Saturday night. The party, by the way, was a great night and everyone had a good time (we had Murray on speaker phone when the speeches were on and took lots of photos to show him the next day). He had a chest x-ray that was clear and more blood tests and then on Sunday got told he was a mystery. The specialist seemed to feel that although he showed all the signs of a heart attack, he did not have all the symptoms to back this up (such as chest pain, tingling in arms) - he only had the blood enzymes as possible proof. So at this point all he had was an irregular heart rhythm (that he could possibly have had since birth) and no other information to explain why the episode occurred and that they wanted more tests to rule out every other possibility. So today (Monday) he had an angiogram ( that shows any blockages in arteries) this was all clear which was good news. He was scheduled to have an echo (ultrasound of the heart structure) this morning before the angiogram, however typically the hospital stuffed up and this didn't happen. After the angiogram he had to lay on his back for 4 hours so any chance of doing the echo needed to be from 3pm onwards however as much as we kept asking when it would happen the time kept ticking away until it was too late to happen today. Murray is so frustrated as he is feeling fine but needs to get the results of this test before they will look at discharging him. So another annoying night will be spent in hospital. I'm hoping the echo will happen in the morning (Tuesday) and that I can bring him home tomorrow afternoon. That is assuming all results come back fine. Whilst it would be good news that nothing is wrong with his heart, my concern lies with the fact that we still won't know what caused the episode he experienced on Friday night and whether it could happen again? So that's our bit of news at the moment. As Murray doesn't remember the episode, he's blaming me for him having to stay in there so long (only jokingly of course) but I keep telling him, he didn't see what I saw (that scared the shit out of me!!) and that he's in the best place to try and get it sorted out. He's also a bit worried as he's booked with his Dad, brother-in-law and golf buddies to go for a golfing week holiday to Tura Beach starting this Saturday coming and whether he'll be allowed to go! So hopefully we'll get some answers tomorrow.