Dear Friends and Family,

We know that it has been a while since our last posting but things have been fairly stable. . .that is until today. Matthew had another biopsy and unfortunately the results were not as good as we had hoped. He has mild rejection. We suspected it before we even got the results because his diastolic dysfunction was somewhat off on the echo and his wedge pressure was high on the right heart cath. He isn't going to go back to the hospital because it wasn't bad enough for that but his steroids which had almost been tapered off are now on higher than they ever were before. About 25% of heart recipients will have rejection in the first year. We were certainly hoping that we would be one of those families without any rejection because the mortality rate goes way up now and the longevity of the heart goes down. They have tried to tell us not be too concerned and that they see this all the time . . . I wonder if they have ever been parents.

Needless to say, we are frustrated. It looks like more house arrest is what we are in for. The frustrating thing is that we have done everything that they have asked of us to the T. We haven't missed any doses of any of his drugs, haven't taken him out, and have kept masks on (in our house) until about 10 days ago. Oh how I wish we understood more about immune system.

Matthew doesn't know any different. They call it silent rejection or early rejection because it really hasn't affected him much or his ability to function. Our next biopsy will be in two weeks and we hope that things will look better then. Please keep him in your prayers and we will try to keep you posted.