Just a check up….

June 16, 2016

Today Den has two doctor’s appointments. The first one is with his orthopedic doctor. We needed to find out if he was willing to continue with Den’s current Supartz injections. We had found out the hard way, not all doctors are willing to see Den and work with us for a positive result. Dr. Atkenson was more than willing to continue to see Den. (One down….lots more to go.) We asked about finishing the Supartz injections for Den’s knees. No problem there. Cortisone injections? No problem. Knee replacement? Dr. Atkenson would have to check with the hospital that he did surgery out of to see if they were willing to take Den as a patient. He said he should have an answer by our next appointment. (Fingers crossed)

Next we were off to see Den’s GP, Dr. Hennecke. She immediately remarked on how much better Den’s color was. She was also amazed at how much weight Den had lost, almost 70 pounds. She did her usual once over of Den and we updated her list of his current medications. She also did a blood draw to see where Den’s levels were. She wanted to see if his A1C (a diabetic marker) had gone down. She said she would call me when the results were back.

June 17, 2016

We were up early to get to UofC for our 10AM appointment with the LVAD Team. We started with the usual….weight, MAP, Temp. Then we went over how we had been coping with Den being home and how he was doing adjusting to a new environment and his equipment. We told them that we felt we were doing OK, but we were still working out the kinks. They checked Den’s drive line to make sure no infection was beginning…it was clear and no infection was evident.

We told them that Den’s new eye doctor had scheduled him for his first cataract surgery on July 14 and we needed a letter of release in order to move forward. They gladly gave us one and told us if we ran into any problems to contact them for a referral at UofC.

Next they asked if we had gone to the outpatient clinic for Den’s blood draw earlier in the week. We had, but they had no results from them. So they called and asked for the results to be faxed over ASAP. The results arrived before we were done and Den’s INR was 1.8 (too low). We needed to up his Warafrin tonight and then have a recheck of his INR in 3 days. If his INR was between 2.0 and 3.0 then repeat the same schedule we had just set. The team also added Lasix and Spirolactone back into Den’s med routine.

All in all, they were very happy with the progress that Den was making and urged us to continue what we were doing.