AllThingsMickey4
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2014
Hi everyone. I’m new to this board in hopes of helping my dad. He was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in June. It’s believed that he caught some kind of respiratory virus that infected the left side of his heart shortly after he and my mom took a last minute trip to Disney last December. He spent Jan-May on and off antibiotics and inhalers as they tried to treat his shortness of breath as pneumonia. Eventually he started coughing up blood in the ER, went delirious to the point where he thought the year was 1889, and his legs were the size of basketballs.
He was medically evacuated by airplane to MUSC (4 hours away from us) where he spent 5 days in the ICU and 5 more on the heart floor. The docs told us he was hours from death. During his 10 days at MUSC he lost 40+ pounds from all of the fluid they removed from his lungs and behind his liver (it was close to 2 liters per day while he was in the ICU).
Anyway, we are headed to Disney December 1st and this will be his first big trip after the whole incident. I can tell he is getting nervous about keeping his sodium below 2000 mg a day. He and my mom have been making virtually everything from scratch in order to keep his diet as salt free as possible.
His heart is back up to 35% from 13% when he was admitted to MUSC... Which is huge for just 6 months. I just don’t want this trip to cause him to go backwards. Everything we’ve seen online says to tell the hostess about the low sodium diet when we check in at the restaurants, but I guess we are just nervous that they won’t take it seriously Salt is scary because of how much is hidden in things we eat everyday!
I guess I’m looking for tips, advice and reassurance that he can make it through 8 days without any heart failure episodes. When they eat out at home they go places where they can find the nutritional info online. We have already booked ADRs for all table service restaurants and will be avoiding counter service
He was medically evacuated by airplane to MUSC (4 hours away from us) where he spent 5 days in the ICU and 5 more on the heart floor. The docs told us he was hours from death. During his 10 days at MUSC he lost 40+ pounds from all of the fluid they removed from his lungs and behind his liver (it was close to 2 liters per day while he was in the ICU).
Anyway, we are headed to Disney December 1st and this will be his first big trip after the whole incident. I can tell he is getting nervous about keeping his sodium below 2000 mg a day. He and my mom have been making virtually everything from scratch in order to keep his diet as salt free as possible.
His heart is back up to 35% from 13% when he was admitted to MUSC... Which is huge for just 6 months. I just don’t want this trip to cause him to go backwards. Everything we’ve seen online says to tell the hostess about the low sodium diet when we check in at the restaurants, but I guess we are just nervous that they won’t take it seriously Salt is scary because of how much is hidden in things we eat everyday!
I guess I’m looking for tips, advice and reassurance that he can make it through 8 days without any heart failure episodes. When they eat out at home they go places where they can find the nutritional info online. We have already booked ADRs for all table service restaurants and will be avoiding counter service