After 3 days of Taylor being on the ecmo machine there had been no improvement to her heart so on the 25th January the cardiologist decided to install a pacemaker in Taylor’s chest to help control her abnormal heart rhythms. Things were looking good, the doctors even reduced Taylor’s sedation levels, which meant she would wake up every now and then and we could talk to her. She couldn’t talk back to us because of the breathing tube, but she found other ways to communicate to us like blinking and Taylor being Taylor always trying to give us the thumbs up. The doctors saw this as a good sign and were to talking about taking her off the ventilator.
Unfortunately this didn’t last long and Taylor’s condition quickly deteriorated, and then her heart stopped beating completely.
It was only now that the doctors, nurses and cardiologist realised it was more then an abnormal heart rhythm, it was a virus that was attaching to her heart called Myocarditis (a heart condition caused by a virus. The virus attacks the heart muscle, causing inflammation and disrupting the electrical pathways that signal the heart to beat properly.)
After the discovery of the Myocarditis and 9 days after being admitted to the RCH, Taylor no longer had a heartbeat. The only thing keeping her alive was the ecmo machine and this was only a temporary solution. The cardiology team decided to install a VAD (Ventricular Assist Device, also known as mechanical pump) that would help Taylor’s heart to pump blood throughout her body, but it also meant major open heart surgery. On the 2nd of February, Taylor had her first open heart surgery, l say first – because there were two more that would follow. The second one on the 9th February to alter the way the VAD was sitting around her heart; and the 3rd was emergency surgery to drain blood that had built up around her heart on the 12th February.