My 88 year old mother was admitted to the hospital yesterday with pneumonia and congestive heart failure. She’s not the strongest person, she has a pacemaker and has been confined to a wheelchair for the last year or so, and she’s apparently on some pretty aggressive treatment to reduce the fluid in her lungs.
My question: I’ve always heard congestive heart failure was pretty much a last diagnosis before the heart failed. Now, in doing some reading, I am presented with information that it’s not a death sentence, but is curable and if treatment is aggressive enough, it will most likely reverse itself.
I’m confused. Can someone set me straight on this?
My 82-year old grandfather was just diagnosed with this, after a similar trip to the hospital. They told him that it’s completely treatable with a combination of a low-salt diet and the drug Cumadin, which requires that he go in for frequent blood tests.
It is something that can get better if everything goes just right, and it is a condition in which heart failure is close. The patient will have to watch their health condition in the future more carefully.
CHF can be treated two different ways: reducing the fluid around the heart, and/or increasing the strength of the heartbeat.
#1 is usually done with a combination of steroids and diuretics; the traditional drug for #2 is digitalis, although there are other newer drugs for this.
My grandmother lived with CHF for several years, BTW.
Thank you for the information. I spoke with the hospital this morning and Mom’s doing much better - they’re going to keep her for a week or so to get all the fluid off her lungs.
Good to know it’s not an automatic death sentence.
A few years ago I remember reading a review article about CHF that started by saying the the prognosis for a person with newly diagnosed CHF is roughly the same as for someone with newly diagnosed cancer. I don’t think things have changed too much. Something like 50% (or maybe more) will live > 5 years.
Of course, as with most diseases, it depends on age and the cause of the heart failure.
Your mother’s case sounds a bit like my mother’s case. She was diagnosed with idiopathic heart failure at around 85 causing her to give up tennis. She died a few days after her 90th birthday. (Darth Cheney on the other hand, is still kicking.)
The worst thing about CHF is the treatment. Not that it is painful or anything but the doc has to “tune up” the patient with a variety of meds to keep the circulatory system working well enough to oxygenate the patient and not allow fluid to build up where it shouldn’t. This is largely a trial and error process. Expect that that your mother will be in and out of the hospital a few times in the next 12 months or so being tuned up and being treated for side effects of her meds.
The worst thing for my mother was that her HMO doc thought she wouldn’t live more than a year and felt put out that he was asked to admit her to the hospital and go to the trouble of tuning her up several times in the last years of her life. The HMO wished she would just go home and die thereby improving their bottom line. But she lived 4 pretty good years longer and was mentally as sharp as ever when her body finally just gave out.
Although your mother may live another 5 years, do expect that she may have some medical crises and do be sure that you, she, and any other involved relatives have decided what kind of actions should be taken if she takes a severe turn for the worse and make sure that her doc knows what her wishes are. One of the worst things to happen to an 88-year-old with CHF in a wheelchair is to be treated super aggressively the way you would treat a 21-year-old with an injury. An appropriate aim is treatment of what can be treated (e.g., a tune up if the heart has some reserve) and comfort. My mother died in her apartment, appropriately medicated with pain meds, with a hospice nurse and her daughter at her side, not in some damn hospital.