The Derek Report

Most 17-year-olds do not crave great gobs of attention. At least not any of mine.

However, I did promise to update on the MRI, so here goes...

There's nothing big. It was pretty normal. I'd forgotten that one of the reasons they were doing the MRI was to check out a little place on the aorta that had looked slightly enlarged in his last echo. It doesn't look bad in the MRI so there are no impending aneurysms ready to blow.

One of the reasons I thought they were doing the MRI is because once you have a pacemaker, you cannot do the cardiac MRI, the gold standard test for ARVD. Derek is destined to have a pacemaker some day (and at the end of last year we thought he'd have one by now).

But he's managed not to go into sustained atrial fibrillation for a third time, meaning we can put off the pacemaker until that happens.

As to ARVD (Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia), that was the pathology report on Loren's old heart. It is a broad category into which Loren's particular heart history fits in an odd and somewhat atypical way.

Having said that, the cardiac MRI can take better pictures of the beating heart than any other test. These pictures can detect if there is the start of scar tissue or fat replacing normal heart cells. The gradual replacement of heart tissue with scarring or fat is what leads to the various arrhythmias, since those abnormalities mess up the electrical conductivity of the heart.

In reality, Derek is probably too young to exhibit any of this as yet, since most of the history of people dying suddenly in Loren's family involved those in their early 40's.

So I had thought they might find or not find something in conjunction with possible ARVD, but now I realize they probably weren't looking for that, they were just checking the aorta.

In case this all bores you to tears, it's enough to know that the MRI was normal :-)
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Derek has been involved in another endeavor however, preparing for the upcoming SAT test on October 4th in Waterloo

I don't believe in paying lots of money for tutoring or going to extremes, but he's been practicing writing essays and going through a prep book and taking practice tests.

He took one test last week, one today, and will take a 3rd practice test early next week. After the REAL test he'll probably need some kind of extensive brain therapy to recover lost cells. I remember Kendra and Jason exclaiming over brain fatigue. Or maybe that was hunger...

After the test is over, it's a simple matter of getting his wisdom teeth extracted by the (hopefully) amazing senior resident oral surgeon down at University of Iowa on October 20.

Then we can stop driving all over the state for awhile.

Well, maybe after the Master Gardening classes are finished.
 

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