Man this girl has a lot of adventures. Good thing she's up for them.
She had her second cardio appointment of the year in Plano the Monday before Thanksgiving. Interesting timing on my part because I was sick off and on the week before that decided to be pretty fully on Thursday. I was feeling better enough to take her on Monday, so we set off, but that meant that very little preparations for our annual Walke Thanksgiving trip to New Braunfels had been done since I'd been in bed for three days.
Anyway....driving in the metroplex on a holiday week with Miss Chatterbox in the back on the tail end of a three day bout of illness was not my idea of a good time. But you gotta do what you gotta do. Austin stayed home with the other three to try to get some stuff done for the trip (and he did get quite a bit done over the weekend while I was down). And thankfully, Eden passed out asleep thirty minutes into the trip and didn't really wake up until we got to the hospital in Plano.
We were an hour early so we got some lunch at the cafeteria and managed to eat some of that while filling out another 8 page developmental assessment before they called us back.
Her height and weight are currently in the upper percentiles, like 78 and 85% or something. Her oxygen levels were on the lower end of her normal, but she was chatting away to the technician. Everything else seemed ok. Her EKG seemed normal, too. We had an echo and then we waited around a bit for the doctor, giving us more time to fill out the assessment form. Those things seriously take a long time. You ask the child to do all kinds of tasks and Eden typically doesn't want to do the things she knows she's going to struggle with. I definitely get that.
After a bit, Dr. S came in and talked to us and told us that Eden's VSD is starting to close. That's the hole between her venticles, the chambers in the bottom of her heart. Those are switched, so having the hole there is helping things out. Everything is screwed up, yes, but screwed up in such a way that it's working really well. So the VSD closing is not a great thing. No one get excited or start saying "Praise God!" This isn't a good thing. This could lead to the ASD, the hole between the upper chambers of her heart, having more stress on it, or really, just more stress on her heart in general, which could lead to heart block. Heart block means a pace maker. Pace makers are not a terrible thing by any means, but they are also not ideal for children. Pace makers are, from what we've been told by Eden's cardiologist, about a ten year stalemate before we're looking at a heart transplant.
At the same time, no one start to freak out. Eden is still ok. She's doing fine. The VSD is closing, yes, but slowly, and this was expected. I don't know if there's a way to stop it, or to push it back open. I didn't think to ask those questions. We have a follow up appointment in 4 months during her Spring Break so I'll ask that then.
While we were talking about Eden's development in relation to the assessment form, I mentioned her struggles in school seem to all be with discipline, that she seems to be doing pretty well academically. Dr. S commented that she'd recently been to a conference where they were told that a lot of cardio patients have been noted to have disciplinary issues, ADD, and ADHD and there have been studies that have linked it to the low oxygenation due to their cardiac issues. So her strong willedness and defiance are not just because she's my daughter and my mother's granddaughter (though that definitely helps) but it's also part of her diagnosis. So hey. Silver linings. And something to warn her future teachers.
I knew I had a stressful drive ahead of me so I couldn't really let myself think about hard things in that moment or I knew I'd fall apart on the way home and I couldn't do that. I managed to keep it together for a while then lost it and threw a can of evaporated milk at Austin at home and later sat in a parking lot and cried on the phone to a friend. It was not my finest moment.
So we will continue to keep an eye on her, making sure she doesn't get overtired or have any more episodes like she did a year ago. At least we're fortunate with her that it IS just a watching and waiting game, and not a constant rotation of surgeries and check ups.
