Diana’s Heart Checkup

Yesterday we took Diana to Primary Children’s Medical Center for a heart checkup. Diana has a congenital heart defect called “ASD” that consists of a hole in her heart as well as veins that aren’t properly draining into the heart. The official term is Atrial Septal Defect with Anomalous Venous Connection. Because only one of her veins is messed up she doesn’t have “Total Anomalous Venous Connection” which is when all your veins are screwed up.

Diana doesn’t like getting an EKG

Diana cried when they hooked her up to the EKG machine. The hard part about getting an EKG is that she has to lay still for ten consecutive seconds in order to get an accurate reading. When she wiggles, it messes up the reading and you have to try again for another ten seconds. We tried a variety of methods to get Diana to lay still but the most effective method finally proved to be to count the seconds out loud with her.

Counting to ten.

If you’re a “count the wires” type of person like Grandpa Kent is, that’s 12 wires coming off her (fortunately they are just sticking to her as opposed to stuck into her).

After the EKG, the doctor listened to her heart and said everything is fine. They still want to wait until her heart is larger before the operate. Waiting for Diana to grow will make the sugery easier for the surgeon and the risks of developing pulmonary hypertension at Diana’s age is minimal. Because the benefits of waiting for surgery outweigh the risks, it will likely be another year or more until Diana has open heart surgery. If she had a normal ASD condition, they could repair it without doing open heart surgery. Unfortunately, the nature of her defect, along with the messed up vein, will require open heart surgery.

The end result was that we set an appointment six months from now for futher evaluation. In the meantime we’re supposed to keep an eye on her and, in the doctor’s words, “let us know if she starts turning blue.