Hannah’s Journey

We apologized for the lack of updates to the site. Thanks to Wayne and Elisa, we are now up and running again. Be sure to check the post before this one to read about Austin’s exciting “adventure.” Hannah had chemo the week of August 14. In the weeks after chemo, she was having problems with low blood pressure, and her heart was racing. She also complained of back pain, which we felt was related to her lung surgery. This past Tuesday, her oncologist called and asked us to come to the city for an echocardiogram just to make sure things were good with her heart and to possibly find out why her heart was racing so much. The echo showed that her heart had excess fluid around it and the decision was made to do emergency surgery on her heart that day. Of course, we had taken the suitcases out of the car because she was past the point where she was usually admitted for fever. The surgery was in the evening and the surgeon removed about 330 cc’s of fluid (normally around your heart there is 20-30 cc’s). They left a chest tube in to drain off any extra fluid and the fluid was sent to pathology. The good news is that there were no cancer cells in the fluid. We are still unsure of what caused the build up, but she will be in the hospital at least until tomorrow (Tuesday) when they will do another echo and hopefully get the pathology report back. All of the symptoms she was having were related to this heart problem. On Tuesday, we should also get an update on how treatment will procede in light of this setback. Hannah’s spirits remain high, especially since we were able to catch up on all of our ‘chick flick” movies (We included Chicken Little under the chick flick category). Bill and I changed places on Sunday evening, so now the movie selection is probably action and science fiction.