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.