Friday, April 3, 2009

Zachy's Heart

I have asked you, in the past, to pray for Zachy and his lack of endurance.
He saw the doctor last week, and I figure the least I can do is share with you what happened! How generous, I know.
A pacemaker works in a couple of ways. First, they set a threshold for minimum beats per minute. Zachy's is set at 80. So, anytime his heart rate drops below 80, the pacemaker strikes. Which, is essentially all the time.
The other way it works is by sensor. This is for activity. There is a crystal in the pacemaker, and basically, when it jiggles, it tells the pacemaker that the person is active and needs a higher pulse rate.
Before November, the crystal hadn't been activated. He was able to raise his own heart rate when he was active.
In November, they activated it. So, when it jiggled, it told his heart to beat at 120 beats per minute.
What the doctor expected to happen was that after the pacemaker got the beats up, his heart would take over and function like a normal heart and allow the heart rate to go down naturally.
On Monday, he saw his doctor.
They drew out the information from the pacer and a bar graph showed up. Different heart rates. 120 and 80 had high bars. The rest were basically non existent.
What was happening was his pacer would tell his heart to get up to 120 bpm, then as soon as he stopped moving, his rate would crash down to 80 bpm. There was no gradual decline. Just sharp drops.
Talk about tiring a person out!
Dr. Bush has now set it so that after the jiggling stops, his heart rate will decline slowly over ten minutes.
We are back in the wait and see how it all plays out stage. We are praying this will help tremendously.
When we stop and think about it, it totally amazes us. Nothing about his heart working is natural. They did turn the threshold down to 40 on Monday to see what happened and his heart dropped immediately. The doc still says he isn't pacemaker dependent, which only means that he won't die without being paced. But he is currently being paced nearly 100% of the time.
We are so thankful for technology, and the fact that our little boy is here with us.
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Totally related to absolutely nothing...why in the world can't someone invent a universal power cord? I have pictures to upload for you, but cannot find the cord. I just used it, and now it has disappeared. I have a gazillion other cords, none of which fit. It seems so simple to me...one universal cord.
It would certainly make life easier!

3 comments:

Musings of the Mrs. said...

I think you have found a new calling. Please please invent a universal cord for my camera. Thank you.

Just stopping by to welcome you to SITS...

Papa said...

I look forward to the day when there are no cords!
I'm like you. power cords everywhere. And never the right ones.
Have a wonderful weekend!
Papa

Gina said...

Oh, I sooo hope this helps Zachy! No wonder the kid was wiped out! I'm so thankfully for the technology, too!

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