Weaning

Ha Ha! Had you going there, didn't I?

Peeper saw her cardiologist today and he was very happy with everything, and is starting to wean her off of her medications!

Effective immediately, we're cutting them in half - going from four 1 mg doses of Captopril a day to two, and from two 5 mg doses of Lasix to one.

We'll see him again next week, and if he still likes everything he sees, we'll drop the Captopril completely, and if everything is still going this well when we go back two weeks from that, he'll take her off the Lasix as well!

She's been on Lasix since she was about two weeks old, and Captopril since about three weeks, so it will be a big damn deal to be off of them.

He said again that he ". . . knew she'd do well - she was well-nourished and had good protein stores. . . " and that the surgeon had already reported to him that everything went great, with no problems.

When he listened to her heart, as soon as he put the stethoscope to her chest, he said, "Wow - I can't hear a thing!"

Referring, of course, to the complete absence of the murmur that was so prominent just a few days ago!

He also said that her incision looks good, and if the one little stitch in the drain tube incision hasn't come out by next week, he'll snip it out.

("They are supposed to just absorb, but I probably remove more of them than not.")

He did an EKG, which was "beautiful" and he also "like[d] everything about the echo."

(Peeper, for her part, liked nothing about the echo.)

The echo showed no evidence of any residual defects (meaning the holes are completely closed); her heart function looks good (including the right ventricle, which was still not quite up to snuff on Thursday); and the overall size of her heart is smaller, which is good.

As I said above, we'll go back in a week, and then two weeks after that, and if all is continuing to go well, she'll be off her meds by mid-April!