Little change in Dates........

Hello Everyone,

This is Tucker’s mom, Karen. I wanted to update everyone on a few things. First thing is Tucker will not be having his surgery next week due to illness. Tuck has a few things going on, not just his heart condition. The major thing right now is his airway. With Down syndrome come floppy joints, muscles, and small airways. Tucker has always had oxygen levels around 70, a “typical” person runs 100 percent. When he is sick, when he was sick on the 10th of March, his oxygen was 57...not good. This in turn delayed our tonsil surgery, which in turn delayed our heart surgery. Dr Del Nido, the surgeon in Boston doing the heart repair, wants and feels very strongly that Tucker’s airway issues need to be resolved before he can do cardiac surgery. IF we do not do the airway first then recovery could prove to be difficult.

Our Tuck man is a complex fellow. He has had several surgeries before this one and we have learned that Tucker does things on his time schedule, whether I like it or not. So, we are scheduled to go to tonsil/adenoid and tube in ears on April 24th, which will be an overnight stay. We will then be going to Boston June 21st. The #1 Cardiac Pediatric surgeon in the USA was booked in May—imagine that. We will gladly wait for our whole heart. Tucker is stable and actually we have a cardiology appointment next Wednesday to have an EKG and Echo done to check valves and all that good stuff. We will have that done here in KC by our regular cardiologist.

I want to also say THANK YOU to everyone who has taken Tucker into your hearts and your homes; those who have passed this site along; who have donated to our journey, whether it was in the form of monies or in the form of prayer. We absolutely know prayer works and the more people praying for Tucker the better. We are deeply touched by everyone’s generosity.