With Dave back at home after his hiking trip, our life did not slow down at all!
September 19, I had my embolization procedure at St. Paul's! The Pulmonary AVM is an artery and vein that directly connect in my lungs creating a right-left shunt. This allowed a clot through and caused a stroke back in April. This procedure blocked that AVM to eliminate the risk of reoccurrence! It was a wild experience. It was done under "conscious sedation" which I was a bit nervous about since it didn't work at all for my transesophageal echocardiogram back in April, but this was a very different experience. I was so relaxed, felt no pain, and just a little discomfort in my chest, and was able to watch most of the procedure on the screens! They use X-ray and CT technology to use a wire/tube to go through an incision in my groin to my femoral vein all the way to the AVM and then insert a coil (which I actually got to watch be put in place).
The whole procedure took about 2 hours, which was longer than they expected, but it's a serious maze of blood vessels in there and they do it mostly blind. So wild. After the procedure I was on 1 hour of complete bed rest. After that I got up to go pee and started having quite a lot of bleeding from the incision, so it was back for some bed rest and then I was good to go. The bleeding was incredibly triggering from my secondary postpartum hemorrhaging after Eva, but once I recovered from the initial panic I was okay. Mom picked me up and brought me back to her house for the afternoon and I spent the rest of the evening just resting at home. Feels like a bit of a milestone. All I have left for this whole experience that I'm aware of is a liver MRI in November. This will look for any other irregularities and abnormalities of my blood vessels in my liver, where they are commonly formed if you have a genetic condition called HHT. My blood work for HHT came back negative, but apparently that is only accurate 80% of the time. And pulmonary AVMs are caused by HHT 75% of the time. So even if they don't detect anything now, I may just have to have screening every so often.
I was reminded/informed how incredibly lucky I am that I had three healthy pregnancies with this pulmonary AVM though as apparently they can be super dangerous when you're pregnant and your blood volume increases. They can rupture due to their abnormal form. While I had the AVM I was told (in professional medical terms), that I should not get pregnant (not that I was planning to).
Anyway, so that day was full and busy and exhausting. The next day though, September 20, we drove out and dropped the kids off in Agassiz with Dave's parents, and then my parents met us there and we went up to Kelowna for 2 nights for my cousin's wedding! Perfect way to recover from a procedure haha! We had such a wonderful and fun time just being us, and not worrying about parenting. We relaxed, we went for walks, we ate good food, and we partied hard at the wedding. Can't do that every day, but it was super fun and celebratory!
The kids had a great time in Agassiz too! Love that they have grandparents who are involved and so willing to help out! And that it is such a comfortable place for the kids to be :)
When we got home, we started to get back into our regular routine, and I naturally filled up the days at the end of the week! More on that to come...
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