Gavin's Heart (Part 2 of 3)

 

Over the course of the next few days, the doctor's tried to put together what had happened.  They didn't fully understand the circumstances that could have transpired to cause whatever he had experienced.  The working theory is that sometimes an aggressive nasal swab can trigger a vagal response (hits the vagus nerve that runs next to the nostrils and that can cause a response that can trigger someone to pass out).  However, there doesn't seem to have been any known experience for this triggering repeatedly over the course of 20-30 minutes.  However, they could see in the EKG scans that what was happening is that his atrium was beating normal, but as the signal was received into the "pacemaker" or AV node, nothing at all was being propagated to the lower ventricles in the heart to cause them to beat.  Technically, the diagnosis was a 3rd degree AV block.  They wanted to keep him for several days to observe him while we worked on a solution.  

I spent many nights sleeping next to his bed as he just rested and took in all of the medical monitoring that was taking place.  Occasionally his blood pressure would do some weird stuff, or his breathing, or his EKG.  

This became our familiar view night after night as we went through the diagnoses.

After a couple days, with Gavin being pretty stable, we started to talk with the doctors about the long-term plan.  They strongly recommended putting a pacemaker into Gavin because we could not entirely find the cause and guarantee it wouldn't happen again.  This seemed like a tough decision for Tara and I.  On one hand, we agreed that we couldn't risk this happening again when he was on a ski chair lift or driving down the road or something.  On the other hand, how does a 17-year-old need a pacemaker in their heart and what kind of impact would that have on the rest of his life??  After quite a bit of deliberation, and discussions with Gavin and the doctors about quality of life, we decided to go ahead to schedule the pacemaker surgery.