Fabulous End to Fantastic Day

Yesterday we had a great day at Purdue.  We were surprised by many things...  Don't know that I'll have time right now to write about all of them, but two big highlights even beyond what we discovered at the Biomedical Engineering School...

Purdue is BIG.  We walked about 20 minutes between the buildings where we had appointments.  So throughout the day we walked 20 minutes about three different times.  The FANTASTIC part is that Jacob walked EASILY... it was FANTASTIC... it was phenomenal.  It was SO ENCOURAGING... it was FUN!!

You can really only appreciate how FANTASTIC it is to walk that far with Jacob if you have followed us this last month.  What a month March has been!  And actually November-February weren't so easy either!  November-February Jacob was incredibly limited in what he could do physically.  In mid-October he got very short of breath and uncomfortable when we walked around the Evansville Zoo.  That's when we first knew something was wrong.

Then this month has been all kinds of hard with two admissions to Riley.  On Thursday this week, it will be four weeks since Jacob's big surgery.  He still has two more weeks of weight restriction.  He hasn't been able to play sports all month.

But yesterday walking around Purdue was FANTASTIC!!!

Okay... so right now we are driving to Riley for the next round of tests, so I only have a little bit longer before I need to stop typing for now.

Let me tell you about the FABULOUS part of yesterday.  We got to meet Ana and Yann.  They are French graduate students who got their masters degrees in Aerospace Engineering.  Now Ana is working on her doctorate doing research on fluid dynamics for Dr. Rodefeld's permanent heart pump.  Yann writes code to reproduce the results from Ana's testing so that other testing can be done.  We have lots of pictures to show you, but for now we will tell you that this research is INCREDIBLY EXCITING.  We LOVE getting to be on the front edge of seeing how a heart pump is developed.  It's also INCREDIBLY INTRICATE work.  Please pray for Ana and Yann and Dr. Frankel and Dr. Rodefeld and the others on the team; they need divine creativity and perseverance.

Jacob and many other kids and adults like him have half of a functioning heart.  Jacob has had five heart surgeries to maximize his heart function but he still does not have a pump on the right side of his heart.  This research could very possibly lead to a pump for the right side of the heart for people with only a single ventricle.

Even with all of this research on behalf of kids with single ventricles, Jacob is the first real live person that Ana and Yann have met with a single ventricle and subsequent Fontan circulation.  Jacob "showed off" his scars from his five surgeries.  We hope this will be an additional motivator for their research.  We really enjoyed meeting them.  We were blessed and hope we get to spend some more time with them sometime in the future.

Ana, Jacob, Yann in Ana's lab at Purdue.  March 26, 2012