When the heart begins to labor under a disorder, it can begin to adjust, or to 'remodel' itself so that it can continue to work effectively. Unfortunately, the 'cure' is often a detrimental process and leads to eventual heart failure ( I frequently say at this point that I don't like that term because it sounds like the heart stops. A better term is 'cardiac insufficiency', meaning that the heart becomes less efficient at pumping oxygenated blood to vital organs, especially the kidneys. It is the kidneys that keep us from developing the 'ascites' problem that you have, the swelling in your abdomen and in the extremities like hands, ankles, and feet).

The TEE is like a bum colonoscopy, except inserted into your mouth and forced down your esophagus. The idea is to get the probe down beside the heart where the esophagus runs, and to image it from a better position than a wand like they use for external ultrasounds. You will be anesthetized with propofol and perhaps a bit of fentanyl thrown in for discomfort control. This will take at most ten minutes, and you should be awake again and in recovery inside of half an hour from when they put a mask over your mouth and nose....if they don't inject you. You won't remember anything about the procedure, and that is WHY they use the propofol. They don't want patients associating panic with a tube forced down their throats, head held way back like looking at the ceiling, with the procedure if it has to be prescribed again, and the same applies to colonoscopies.

Note that, as inexpert as I am, this is my understanding. When I first saw a cardiologist about my own fibrillating heart, he asked me to get up on his examining table and he lifted my trouser leg and poked my ankle. He wanted to see how well my heart was pumping. If the poke left a visible indentation, and his finger felt the swollen tissue, he'd know I was not just fibrillating but also having kidney problems as a result...more urgency needed.

Your tricuspid valve is not closing properly, so there's a backwashing effect between beats of your right ventricle. The right ventricle pumps stale blood into the lungs via the pulmonary arteries (arteries carry blood away from the heart, so even if it's stale blood, it's leaving the heart after entering the upper right atrium, meant to flow down through the tricuspid to the right ventricle, and the right ventricle sends it over to the lungs....arterial). Instead, when it beats, the right ventricle's pressure forces the limp tricuspid open again, and forces some blood into the atrium above it...quite against the design of the heart. Understandably, this backwashing means spent blood is not getting to the lungs in the volume needed, which means you have less saturated blood with O2 leaving the lungs and then leaving the heart to do another loop to the brain and the rest of your organs and body. Hence, the shortness of breath.