Echo Results

There is so much to share and so much I want to remember but life has been crazy and tiring and I have found it difficult to make time to blog, and the longer I put it off the more overwhelmed I get by the thought of it and so I postpone it again. It’s a vicious circle. So I guess I will just start with what every one has been asking me about…Maggie’s heart.

I took Maggie down to Primary Children’s Hospital on Monday, March 8 for her sedated echocardiogram. The timing worked out great because we were already planning on being in Logan for the weekend (Merritt took the boys to an Aggie game while Maggie and I relaxed at the hotel) and Merritt’s parents were in Layton. So on Sunday we met them in Layton and they took Merritt and the boys home and Maggie and I stayed in Salt Lake City. I was worried about how Maggie would do with having to fast because she normally wakes up starving and wants food immediately, but she did great. In fact, she did amazing. She was perfectly happy and content even though we waited for over an hour and a half in the exam room. She even let the doctor listen to her heart with the stethoscope without freaking out which was a first. She did start screaming when they put the IV in, but who can blame her, and she quickly became loopy as the drugs took affect. After the echo she woke up pretty quickly and was looking around at the nurses with a glazed looked. As soon as she saw me she started reaching for me (I’ll admit my heart skipped a beat and I couldn’t wait to have her in my arms!).  It wasn’t long before she was demanding apple juice…and more apple juice and because she was doing so well (it wasn’t until later in a restaurant bathroom that she puked all over herself and me) we were free to go after they did a chest x-ray. I was anxious to get the results but our cardiologist wasn’t in that morning and the other doctors said I had to wait for her to call. Grrr. So it wasn’t until that evening that we finally heard the results.

Maggie has a 5 mm VSD, there is a donut shaped membrane above the hole, and her heart and also her lung vessels are enlarged. I am still unclear about exactly what the membrane is doing (that is why I wanted to talk to someone face to face and not over the phone) but I am making a list of questions to call the doctor back with. I was relieved to hear that it was a VSD and not more like we had feared BUT she is still going to require open heart surgery. I had prepared myself for that possibility but it was still hard to hear. No mother wants their child to go through that. Because she is still so little and not growing the surgery needs to be done soon. The hospital should be calling us in the next week to schedule her surgery which will be around the end of April or first of May. I am hoping to wait until after her birthday (May 1) so that we don’t have to spend her first birthday with us in the hospital.

So although it is not as good as we had hoped… it is not as bad as we had feared.