We admitted Gage back to the CVICU at Rady Children's Hospital early morning on Sunday, March 20th. That Saturday he had a really bad day. No smiles; plenty of vomit. He was also doing this thing where he wouldn't hold up his head. It was like he was tiring out and couldn't lift his chin off his chest to look around. We started to suspect that maybe he just didn't have energy as a result of all that vomiting.
Lately, vomiting has become almost normal but Saturday night his vomiting increased to about once every hour. We were worried to the max and to top it off we discovered that he was running a fever of about 101 degrees. That's when we knew he had to get back to the hospital. Up until the fever we were just planning to bring up our concerns at his next appointment. Glad we took him in early because his fever continued and he was extremely dehydrated. He'd been spitting up nearly all the nutrients he needed.
Over the course of the week, doctors began to suspect that he had a possible infection again. No blood tests or cultures have proven that he's got an infection and so it's looking more like the increased vomiting was a result of decreased mitral valve function. A weak heart causing a weak stomach and more. Cultures could still come back positive as we learned in Boston however it's probably safer to say now that it's not an infection.
The plan thus far is to send him back to Boston within the next few days and get his mitral valve corrected. It hadn't been perfect since we left and it seems to be only getting worse as each day goes by. That new valve was either a dud from the beginning or his body just didn't accept it as smoothly as we'd all hoped.
Options now seem to point to either replacing that bio prosthetic valve with another one or placing a Melody Valve (the type we thought we were getting in the first place) inside the old failed valve. I say "failed" because it certainly isn't passing the test. The team is talking about inserting the new valve via a catheter procedure however it's not set in stone yet. We could always end up with open heart surgery #4.
Really praying that Mr. Gage doesn't have to take that route. A quick catheter job and back home in a few weeks would be wonderful. Of course the valve-inside-a-valve method will likely only buy us a couple years before he'll need that first valve completely replaced again. A little at a time though. We'll worry about that later.