Hello, on July 13th 2021 my wife under went surgery to remove her spleen. For years it has been causing her trouble. Low hemoglobin, low Iron, and spherocytosis all attributed to her enlarged spleen. So we went to Duke university and her spleen we removed. It seemed all was well, her hemoglobin jumped up to 13 where it had been 6 or lower and it seemed all was well. That is until they removed her JP drain. When we got home she started swelling in her stomach to the point fluid was leaking out and we went to her DR and they did a scan of her stomach and found that she had a blood clot in her portal vein caused by the removal of the JP Drain. Now we had to go back to duke and we saw another DR that did a Paracentesis to remove the fluid from her abdomen. That procedure was performed twice and they scheduled another surgery called TIPS to redirect the blood flow from the portal vein and try to break up the blood clot. What happens next was so heart breaking for me. My wife underwent this TIPS procedure and because of the blood being redirected, this meant that toxins that normally flow through the portal vein and then the liver to be removed from the body will now be sent directly to the brain. I watched my wife, a bright, smart, who graduated college with a degree in Nursing, struggle to read simple words. She would fall asleep at the drop of a hat, look at her phone screen and try to read a text and could not, she would slur her words, forget what she was doing. This was so heart breaking, we went back to Duke and they told us that she has hepatic encephalopathy and that there are meds that can help remove the toxins from her brain but she will be on them for the rest of her life. Well it has been almost 3 years and she has went through 2 surgeries, 3 Paracentesis and is still on the meds. They do work but she is still not the woman I married. She does not struggle with reading but she still falls asleep at a moments notice. Her blood is still low, and her iron is still low. She has to get a blood transfusion a few times a year and iron infusions almost every month. That has lead to the decision to move so she will have better care. Had we know going in to this that she would still be struggling with her blood and iron we would have never went through this. She lived a much better life before her surgery than she does now. She has missed a lot in these past 3 years, and we can never get that time back.

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