I have not posted in a very long time, please forgive me. I need to share my recent experiences to provide information to everyone and also to provide hope to those that have a form of heart disease. I am currently on a Left Ventricular Assist Device, which was life saving for me.<\/p>\n
I was not feeling very well in the summer\/ fall of 2013, I was feeling tired, breathless, and had pain on the right side of my abdomen. I had to sleep sitting up when I could sleep and could only walk up the stairs when I could muster up the breath and energy to do so. I had to do something about this. I was unable to eat after a while, I had this lump in my throat feeling. I thought well maybe my gallbladder is not functioning properly or I was having gallbladder attacks because of the pain in my abdomen and not being able to keep food down. I actually got my gallbladder removed because it wasn’t functioning properly (later we would figure that it possibly was not working right because there was not enough blood getting to my organs) and still had the same problems, so we determined that wasn’t it. It turned out that my heart failure had flared up. It was getting in my way for the first time since I was diagnosed in 1999-2000. My cardiologist came to me with a solution once we were certain that this was a case of severe heart failure. The solution was a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD), which was implanted in September of 2013. This device has allowed my heart to rest by doing the pumping for my heart. It gets the proper blood flow and oxygen to the rest of my body. With this device I can live a normal life, I am working full time, exercising, enjoying time with family and friends, and traveling. There are some restrictions such as swimming which is no big deal.<\/p>\n
The main ideas that I want people to take away from all of my posts is hope and knowledge, there are ways of getting around heart failure so you can continue to live a productive and normal life. There are more solutions being worked on constantly through research and advanced technologies to possibly cure this condition someday.<\/p>\n
There is a support site for LVADs, please visit http:\/\/www.mylvad.com for more information.<\/p>\n
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I have not posted in a very long time, please forgive me. I need to share my recent experiences to provide information to everyone and also to provide hope to those that have a form of heart disease. I am currently on a Left Ventricular Assist Device, which was life saving for me. I was not feeling very well in the summer\/ fall of 2013, I was feeling tired, breathless, and had pain.. Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66,"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/66"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}