Lifesavers for Latasha

Today marks the 30-day mark that Latasha and I have been at Cleveland Clinic for her heart and double lung transplant.

If you’re just tuning in, here is a quick recap: On July 1, 2024, Tasha and I made the three-hour drive to Cleveland Clinic for our second HLT offering. We optimistically made the drive, most of it in anxious silence. Fast-forward to today, and four surgeries later and too many scars to count, we sit here with a few more weeks of hospital stay ahead of us.

It has been an adventurous thirty days, full of many highs and, sadly, more lows and more emotions than I thought I could feel in an hour or day. It’s been rough, to say the least.

But as I sit here by Tasha’s side and have more and more conversations with nurses, therapists, and doctors, I take solace in the fact that that slow-winding rollercoaster is chugging along as it does. We’re not unique; we’re just another passenger along for the ride. And that’s a good thing because even though Tasha’s trifecta of complexities with Congenital Heart Disease, Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension, and Arterial Venus Malformations, every single doctor has confidence in Tasha’s strength and pace of recovery. Fortunately, the doctors had already anticipated complications and were prepared every step of the way to fix them and course-correct her recovery. It is truly unique to watch that in action

The best part of all these setbacks is that Tasha’s new heart and lungs have taken all of this in stride and shown no signs of fatigue or stress. That’s a great sign of the future and the adventures ahead that she can go on—the dreams she can tackle, the goals that she will crush.

To the update, today Tasha has had a revolving door of specialists, surgical teams, therapists, doctors from the transplant team, and the ICU medical staff running all sorts of scans, X-rays, lab work, and tests to see where her system is. As of right now, she still has a small hematoma on her right lung that they are observing. Her kidneys have made a fast recovery by doing what they do, and her creatinine levels are slowly going down to a better range. That means no dialysis as long as it continues to go down steadily.

Unfortunately, though, she has developed many more clots throughout her body, so that means a strictly monitored protocol to dissolve them using more blood thinners. This very thing landed us in surgery number four. But this time, they’re taking it very slowly and methodically so as not to upset the lung bleed.

All of that is to say, considering all of it, Tasha is doing well and making good progress toward a discharge, which is likely a few weeks away. This setback will probably keep us in Cleveland an extra month longer than anticipated, so we’re trying to figure out that financially. More to follow in that subject as we figure out the new post-hospital stuff.

As always, thank you for your support and prayers. It is greatly appreciated.