Adryanna Laura Carolyn Boulianne

On October 21, 2006 I became a Mommy!!!  It was the most amazing and exciting day.  The night before I thought I was having some stomach trouble and just couldn't figure out why my body was being so annoying.  I remember trying to watch something on tv and every commercial I was running to the bathroom but nothing would happen.  It never occured to me that there was any pattern to what was happening even when I was standing leaning on the back of the couch swaying back and forth.  I think it was about 10:00pm when I finally thought that perhaps I was in labour but then thought there was no way what I was feeling could possibly be the horrible pain people talk about.  Adrian got home from work around 11:30pm and I told him that I thought I might be in labour.  We went to bed to try to get some sleep and despite some discomfort I was able to sleep on and off until 5:29am when I tried to get up to go to the washroom and my water broke.  Off to the hospital we went and at 1:24pm after a fairly uneventful labour Adryanna was born weighing a crazy 10lbs 11oz!!!  The only complication was that she had partial shoulder distocia and her collarbone broke.  She didn't seem bothered by it and when she was about a week old they told us that it was healed.

Just hours old!

The past 5 years have been a constant source of amazement for me.  She has learned so much and become such a dynamic little girls.  She is so super smart that when she was a baby I honestly thought she was going to be a genius.  I know all mothers thing this of their children but Adryanna just did everything so early.  She sat unassisted at 5 months and crawled shortly after that.  She was very strong right from the beginning (I figure it's from all of the Tums I lived on when I was pregnant).  We have some pictures of her lifting her head off our shoulders when she was still in the hospital!  She walked at the very early age of 8.5 months and ran at 8.5 months and 1 day ;)  She started talking fairly early as well and by the time we went for her first appointment at McMaster when she was around 2.5 years old they decided to skip the speech part of the assessment because her vocabulary was so good.  Last year she started school and continues to amaze me to this day with how much she learns and knows.  Just today she was in her room writing a story on her whiteboard and had many of the words spelled correctly!

When Adryanna was just over 2 years old she had a cold and a horrible cough.  I took her to her pediatrician and he said that although she didn't have pneumonia or anything he heard for the first time a heart murmur.  This both scared me and intrigued me.  Why couldn't he hear it before but now he could?  Was she going to be ok?  I knew that murmurs were pretty common and often nothing so I tried not to worry while we waited for what would be her first of many echos.  The first one was horrible, she was scared and they couldn't get anything done because she was crying too much.  They decided she would need to be sedated so we left and I was very upset with the way she had been treated so we went back to her pediatrician and asked for someone else to do it.  Within a couple of weeks we had the sedated one done and the doctor that did it told us right away that he did see a defect and that we would go to McMaster for more testing.  So every few months since then she has had echos done.  What we found out is that her defect was so small that it couldn't be heard until her heart grew and the defect got bigger.  We then found out that the initial diagnosis of a coronary artery fistula might not be right.  In the summer of 2010 we were sent to Sick Kids for more extensive testing and finally got a diagnosis of a Tunnel from her Aorta to her Left Ventricle.  What's happening is that when blood should be pumping out of her left ventricle and up her aorta there is a small trickle coming back into the ventricle.  So far there are no complications but on her last echo in the summer they noticed a slight increase in the size of her left ventricle.  The plan right now is to let her grow some more and repair the defect when she is between six and eight.  It's a minor procedure and if all goes well she'll be back to normal in a couple of days.

So thank you Adryanna for being in my life and teaching me all about being a Mommy!