From the Heart- A Visit to Clinic + Next Step

Hi everyone!  How has your week been?  I want to dedicate today's post to giving you all a medical update.

To review:  As I said in my last "from the heart" post, I had to go to my local hospital to have an angiogram and heart cath done.  As I said in that post, the angiogram turned out to be more than I expected in that the vascular surgeon ended up inserting 4 stents into my upper right leg because the main vein that supplies blood to that leg was almost totally occluded.  In that post, I said that the stents he inserted opened up 4 cm of the vein, but I was actually incorrect; they opened up about 8 cm of the blocked vein!  Also in the post about my heart procedures, I talked about how recovering from anesthesia was pretty rough 😬.  The last important aspect of my most recent "from the heart" post is that I said that I would have a follow-up appointment in the cardiology clinic a couple of weeks after the procedures, which is what I did on Wednesday.

To assuage your fears, I will start off by saying that God blessed the follow-up appointment and that it went really well 🙌!  The vascular surgeon looked at my leg and saw that the appearance of the veins has visually improved, indicating that the internal blood flow has improved as well.  I think this is the time to clarify that opening up these veins was not a procedure done for cosmetic purposes; the outward appearance of the veins showed that something was not right internally and an obvious result of some resolution of the internal problem is that the external problem has improved as well.  I'm not that vain 😉! (See what I did there 😜?!)

The vascular surgeon also said that I should not sit for long periods of time without getting up and walking around so that the blood keeps flowing as it should.  He also said that I should wear compression stockings when standing for a long time and going on a plane.  This goes to show that compression stockings aren't just for old grannies 😜!

In terms of cardiac health, God is helping my heart to continue to work well 🙌!  My cardiologist is pleased with how the pressures in the heart are and he wants me to keep exercising and singing (two things I plan on doing) to help keep my heart and lungs healthy!  He also said to try not to get super hurt or anything because suffice it to say, that's not what I need right now 🙃.

So what are the next steps in my health journey?  I will be having an appointment to get custom-made compression stockings probably sometime in the near future.  I will also be going back to the cardiology clinic in about 3 months to see how my heart and circulation are doing. In about 6 months, the vascular surgeon is planning on continuing to deal with the circulation issue in my leg and is hoping that he will not have to do any more work on it again after that.  He said that he is fine with me having conscious sedation for this next procedure in lieu of general anesthesia but that we will need to talk with the anesthesiologist about that first.  I was happy to hear that because I would really like to avoid going under general anesthesia again if I don't have to!  Other than that, I'm just going to keep living life knowing that God will continue to take care of me if I serve Him!

That's all for now.  Don't forget to follow me on Instagram!  I look forward to posting again on Monday 😊!