Terry had a follow up appointment with the cardiologist two days ago. Dr. Brown has been really good about seeing him more often post thyroid cancer and pheochromocytoma, so it was a chat about how things are going. It truly is hard to know how much those two separate conditions played into his overall cardiac health, so I have appreciated the additional visits with him.
It has been frustrating, however, that he has not been willing to consider how the nausea and vomiting that have occurred for almost seven years might be tied to his cardiac condition. After some discussion regarding theoretical causes, he was willing to consider a problem with either a blockage or potential limited blood flow to his intestinal system. Dr. Eck, his endocrinologist, has supported that idea with us, so we were able to secure a referral for a dye contrast scan to look at blood flow.
He gets that scan on Tuesday, the 10th of May. That gives us the opportunity to get those results to KU Med for his appointment with the GI department the following week. It was the vomiting that prompted the referral to KU Med last year, but once they found the other problems the vomiting issue went to the bottom of the heap. Discovery and treatment of the two conditions last year did not have the additional benefit of eliminating the nausea and vomiting, so we have hopes this test may yield information. There has to be a physiological cause. End of discussion. Just because they have not determined what it is yet does not mean it is not real.
All things considered, his cardiologist is pretty encouraged he's doing as well as he is. Terry did admit to him, and had not admitted to me, that he's noticing he's getting winded and needing a break if he's out in the garden or trying to work on something for 30 minutes or more. There have been several times when I felt he was breathing harder than usual, but he always minimized any concerns. Listening to him confess to the cardiologist confirmed what I've noticed. He's not having much swelling to his hands or feet yet, so I hold onto that piece of good news while we have it.
While it won't surprise me, it will be disappointing if we find out his nausea is a by product somehow of his cardiac disease. I realize everything he's gone through has been difficult to diagnose, which I reminded Dr. Brown, but I have pushed hard on the cardiac side of things for answers for a while now, and we could not get any doctors, much less the cardiologist, to consider the connection. As long as we finally get some answers I'll forgive him if it turns out to have a cardiac component. We just need to know.
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