Li'l Miss Swiss Cheese Heart

Hannah and I bundled up today and went to see her cardiologist.  I'm happy to say that may be one of our last visits!  That's because Dr. C said he sees no reason to put off her surgery any longer and he will be presenting her case to the surgeons for consideration at their conference on Tuesday.  Hooray!  I felt a little weird during the appointment when I was getting excited about her surgery.  I'm sure at some point it will hit me and I will get scared and nervous and cry again, but for now I'm relieved.  

So here are the answers to some of your questions:

-Hannah breathes fast.  Like 80 breaths a minute when she's awake.  This is pretty much her norm and has been since birth, but she's going to start tiring out soon.  Fixing the holes in her heart will cure that.

-Ready to get your Google on: Hannah has an atrial septal defect (ASD) which the cardiologist said is more like a patent foramen ovale (PFO), two ventricular septal defects (VSD) one is kind of in front of the other, and a patent ductus arteriosus (PDA), these are the holes the surgeon will close.  There are some other little variations in her heart that the doc said are like little oddities that they don't need to fix and won't affect her at all.  I can picture the surgeons getting into her little chest and going, "huh, look at that..." 

-Her heart was enlarged a little at the last appt in September, it's working harder to pump the blood thru her body, it's a muscle, therefore it grows.  Now the left ventricle is starting to enlarge as well.

-She is not gaining weight as fast as she used too, she was 6 lbs 14 oz today with a wet diaper on!  She should be 7 lbs or more if she was following her growth curve.

-Once the surgeons decide it's time to do surgery it should only take a week or two to get her on the schedule. 

-She will probably be in the hospital for a week or maybe two after her surgery, it all depends on how well and soon she can start eating again. 

 

And lastly:

-It's open heart surgery. That one took me awhile to wrap my mind around.  There are some other complex details that I'm probably forgetting for now, but that touches the surface.

So I'm happy.  And excited to get this all over with and behind us.  I'm nervous about surgery, but I've already had a chance to roll some of that around in my head for awhile, so I'm not as freaked out about it.

So be praying that the surgeons accept Hannah for surgery, that we can schedule it really soon and that she stay healthy so she can have surgery when it's scheduled.  I think I'm going to go buy a Costco size bottle of hand sanitizer and slather the other two kids in it daily.  You can email me questions, thanks for reading!