The next big day postponed?

So apparently, Teddy is in the like 5% of people who can benefit from ballooning. His surgeon, Dr. Galantowicz said that it would be worth while for him. This means that instead of open heart surgery, it will be done in the cath lab. They'll do the whole thing without having to open his chest. They'll thread a little balloon into his heart, going up through the femoral artery in his thigh. That balloon will inflate a bit and stretch the valve. The issue that he has is stenosis, which is medical talk for "this valve is too narrow to let blood through." So they'll stretch it out, likely causing it to leak (or leak more than it has been). Turns out that the heart can tolerate leaking a lot more than it can stenosis. Ideally, this will be a year before his surgery. His cardiologist says that she'll be happy with 6 months, but a year is possible. Of course, it could also turn out to not help at all, and he'll immediately be scheduled for surgery after. 

The question a lot of people may be wondering is "Why do this if it only buys maybe 6 months?" Well, when you're doing open heart surgery on a kid, the goal is to put it off as long as possible. For one thing, he'll grow more and that could open other options to you. For another thing, that's 6 months or a year of growth that the new valve won't have to accommodate. Eventually, Teddy will get big enough that they can replace a valve like they do with an adult, without doing open heart surgery. So you're not just putting this surgery off, you're putting every surgery after this off for a bit. So if you push it long enough, you might be able to push the next surgery into the point where maybe you can do an entire valve replacement without open heart surgery.