Me.....a blogger? Who'd of thunk it!!!

There are quite a few bloggers in the LVAD community so I thought, what the heck, I may as well jump on the bandwagon and give it a try!!  While we were in the hospital I had a little 4" spiral memo pad that I kept notes on , I won't transfer all of that over but it is nice to have it as a reference and I am glad I have it.

I'll start out with a little of our background!  Todd and I started dating wayyyy back in high school and were married a couple of years later.  We will be celebrating our 34th wedding anniversary this spring!! Todd is a project manager that works mostly with the automotive industry and I work in a daycare.  Both of us are not working at this time...Todd has not been given the" all clear" yet and I am his caregiver , since he can't be left alone I haven't gone back to work either.

We are the proud parents of three wonderful children with the added bonus of 3 Grandchildren and one on the way!!! David and his wife Liz, have two adorable daughters, Emma, 5 and Madeleine, 3...they live about 3 minutes away! Our son, Zac, is next, he is about 15 minutes from us and then we have Ali and her husband, Brandon who have Hunter, 16 months, and a baby due in the spring...they might be 4 minutes away from us if the traffic is good!! So, we are very blessed to have our children nearby!

Up until Todd's heart attack we were just your average family...we were super active, hiking, swimming, kayaking ...never taking any medication at all.  Then this hit and BAM...everything totally changed!! We are try to get used to the adjustments and the lifestyle change and slowly getting the hang of it...or I should say once I feel like we are, something new challenges us !!

It started out like any other day....

It was just a regular Monday...or so I thought!!  We got up early to start our day, Todd went to work and I had that Monday off.  I have Monday's off because I take my Mom to Chemo on every other Monday...this was my off week so I was looking forward to having the day to do some things around the house.  I went to early Mass, came home, cleaned out the closets and had a huge bag of things to take to Goodwill, dropped that off and did a little shopping and cleaned the house.  Our grand daughters came over for dinner and were already there when Todd came home from work, he was thrilled to see them, as always!!  We had dinner, the girls left and we settled in to watch our favorite Monday night show, Dancing With the Stars!  It was about half way over when we decided we were tired and were going to watch the rest of it up in bed...I looked over at Todd and he said he wasn't feeling well and had his hand to his chest!! I hurried and called 911....luckily they were there in minutes and that is when the nightmare began!! They had to paddle him 3 times in the ambulance en route to our hospital about 10 minutes away...He had just suffered a massive heart attack, they call it the widow maker! What followed that was a string of procedures, heart cath, balloon, impella all within a week before they decided to put him on the survival flight to UM hospital in Ann Arbor...then it was touch and go, he had the tandem heart pump , then that lead to the LVAD on Oct 14, 2011. He was in a drug induced coma for about 3 1/2 weeks...it has been a long haul but we FINALLY got to come home on the day before Thanksgiving!! We are slowly adjusting to our new routine...doctors appointments, medicine, alarms, trying not for forget our spare batteries when we leave the house! We have to thank all of our wonderful family and friends for the tremendous amount of support they have given us throughout this, we could not have survived without them...we appreciate it so much!!!