I have a child with a heart defect. It is so hard for me to say this. The reason, no one would ever know it to look at her. I see sick children and I know how their parents feel. The fear of what will happen and knowing that you have to trust others to do for your child what you can’t. Knowing that you just have to trust that God knows what he is doing.

Little Miss has been full of surprises since her conception. We found out I was pregnant with her about the same time as we were going to start trying for #2.  My pregnancy with her wasn’t much different than with Boo, I was sick, a lot. When we went for our mid-term ultra-sound we planned on finding out the sex so we could call the baby by his/her name as we had done with Boo. No such luck, she refused to show us anything! Then a month before I was due we had another ultra-sound since the doctor didn’t want her to be as big as her sister had been. That time she gave us what J calls a “porno” shot. Everything else was fine, no sign of anything being wrong and she was just a little bigger than the doctor wanted her to be so the plan was to take her a few days early. A week later I started taking insulin and having her heart monitored since my blood sugar was a little high. Still, no signs of any problems.

I went in for my induction on a Thursday evening. At first it seem to be about the same as when I went in for Boo. It didn’t take long for that to change, unlike her sister, when Little Miss decided to get here she was in a hurry. J and the tiniest nurse we had help my legs together for 10 minutes while our doctor drove from the office. When she finally arrived, she was perfect little chunk even if she was smaller than her sister. I was in love.

We heard some muttering about a heart murmur but nobody really said anything until we before we left. The on call doctor told she had a slight murmur but they weren’t worried since they are very common. She would be checked at her one week appt and if it was still there our doctor would decide what to do. A week later it was still there but even though our doctor didn’t think it was much of anything she wanted us to go to a cardiologist.

So at two weeks old Little Miss had her first echocardiogram.  It seemed to take forever for the tech to take all the pictures she needed. Then it seemed to take forever for the doctor to look at them all. When he came in he said that there are times when a heart murmur is nothing but in her case it meant something. He went on to tell us that she has a condition called Tetralogy of Fallot.

Not only was there something wrong with her heart, there were FOUR things wrong with it. First, there was a hole in her heart. Then her Pulmonary artery was too small (after surgery we found out it was HALF the size of what it should have been). These two things cause blood to flow the wrong way and make the heart work harder, this in turn causes the muscle on the right side to swell making the right ventricle smaller.