An update

"In this world you will have trouble, but be brave! I have defeated the world!" ~ John 16:33

Saturday morning found us concerned about Caroline. Her cardiologist warned us early about signs that her heart was failing . . . Trouble eating, sweating when she was eating, increased irritability. By Saturday morning, these things had been happening for a couple of days. On top of that, she was having episodes where she would get inconsolably upset for no apparent reason, would turn bluish purple and would seemingly pass out. This had actually been happening for a while but the episodes were getting closer and closer together.

We called our on-call nurse who in turn called the doctor and suggested that we call our cardiologist. Both doctors wanted us to come back to Dell right away.

We dropped the boys off at my sister's and away we went - packed for a week, just in case.

When we got to the hospital, Jesse went in to register us while Caroline and I stayed in the car. We try to keep her away from as many germs as possible and a children's emergency room, as you know, is full of them. When I came in, there were probably 50 people waiting to been seen in front of us. Unfortunatly (or maybe fortunately), Caroline started having an episode (screaming, coughing, turning blue, not breathing) as soon as we entered. They rushed us immediately back.

The nurse said to me, "Is she normally that pale?" "No", I replied, "She's usually more pale than this!" I think that startled her a little bit.

They immediately started an IV, drew blood for tests, did an ecocardiogram, and an xray. None of these tests showed anything particularly alarming but they decided they wanted to keep us overnight.

The doctor Sunday morning was concerned that her symptoms were being caused by her pulmonary hypertension and was going to talk to the cardiologist about doing her heart repair during this stay.

Her on-call cardiologist did not want to do anything - no change in meds, no catheterization, no repair. He thought that she was still to small and he saw no reason to chance it. Her regular cardiologist decided that it would be a waste of a trip to not at least do the catheterization. So, this morning, she had the procedure done. She went back at 7:30 and we were told that it would be about a 30 minute procedure. At about 8:30 we got a call that they just made it to her heart - they had trouble getting "access". The rest of the procedure took about an hour and by about 10:30 I was able to see her. She was definitely not herself. Although she had a reason to be fussy, it was very hard seeing her this way . . . knowing there wasn't much I could do to fix it.

She seems back to her normal self now. Very smiley and flirty with everyone that comes in. Everyone that sees her comments on how smiley she is. One nurse said she couldn't remember the last time she saw a baby as smiley as Caroline.

We should get a report from the cardiologist soon about his findings from the cath. He told us this morning right after it that the repair would be in a month or so. It's scary to think it will be so soon but we are happy at the prospects that we could have most of this behind us soon.

Hopefully we will get to go home tomorrow . . .