Today marks 2 months since Andrew’s transplant. (Happy 2 Month Lungiversary!) By total coincidence, he had an exploratory bronchoscopy today at Clinic due to some slight wheezing he was experiencing last week. During a bronchoscopy, the doctors go into the lungs with a scope and sort of snoop around to see how things are looking. Often they will extract a small piece of lung tissue to biopsy for an even more detailed analysis.
I guess by now we should be accustomed to the rockiness that is this recovery process, but I think we still have hope every time a procedure rolls around. Which, I guess, is a good thing to have as opposed to living life waiting for the next complication, right? Remind me of that if you ever see me resorting to the latter…
Well, today they found that the deadening scar tissue where the new lungs are connected to his bronchial & pulmonary arteries is not coming out on it’s own and creating a build up of mucus and miscellaneous secretions. The end result is that his airways are narrowing. So, we’ve got another OR visit planned for Friday. This time they’ll do a rigid bronch, like they did when he was still in the hospital, and clean out these secretions, mucus, and dead scar tissue. He’ll have to be fully under anesthesia & he’ll have to be entubated since that’s the easiest way for the surgeons to work with the scope. Luckily for my panic threshold, he’s been through this before and we know what to expect, as do the docs.
In the meantime, they are culturing the bits of secretions that they got today to look for any signs of bacteria or fungus. Since his pulmonary and bronchial arteries are still Cystic Fibrosis-ified, it’s possible. If they find any it will mean getting a couple of weeks of IVs and some inhaled anti-fungal treatments.
I hate the phrase “out of the woods” because that implies that “the woods” is this scary dangerous place where bad things happen. I prefer to think of “the woods” as safe and confined and protected. It’s a much better analogy, in my mind, than feeling exposed and out in the open where anything can happen. I feel like we’ve been “out in the open” for months now and I’m really looking forward to being safe and sheltered, in a sense. His doctors tend to think that this is all just part of the initial recovery phase and that it should all start evening out over the next month or so.
I am hanging on to hope that that is the case and that maybe soon, in the near future, we can have a smooth procedure. Until then, please keep Andrew in your thoughts/prayers/meditations/etc as we go over this next little tiny bump.
Xoxo,
Amber
To CF With Love... 