Happy Heart Month!

February is Heart Month which means there is lots of information about being heart healthy and heart disease floating around.  February 7 - 14th is Congenital Heart Defect Week, Adryanna has a Congenital Heart Defect.  When I realized that she has a cardiologist appointment during heart month I thought it would be perfect to post some information about her heart defect.  Then google failed me:(  I tried to find some links to share here but everything I found was very technical and even I, someone who knows how her heart works, had a very hard time understanding what I was reading.

A few statistics about Congenital Heart Defects (CHD) that I could find are:

• 1 in 100 babies are born with a CHD
• CHD kills more kids than all childhood cancers combined
• Aorta to Left Ventricular Tunnels (what Adryanna has) are incredibly rare.  One stat I found said 0.001% of all CHD
• Many heart defects go undiagnosed at birth
• A simple O2 test at birth can be life saving but is rarely done (that's the thing where the put sensor on your finger to check how much oxygen is in your system)

For those new to my blog Adryanna had a relatively normal birth and was quite happy and healthy.   The only issue we had after her birth was that when she got upset she would start to breath too fast.  The nurses would just take her to the nursery to observe her and when she calmed down her breathing would go back to normal.  They thought nothing of it.  Looking back there is a chance this was the first and only sign of her defect at birth.  When  she was two she got a cold, a really bad cold, and I took her to the pediatrician to get him to check out her cough.  While he examined her he heard a murmur for the first time ever.  Adryanna's heart defect is one that grows as she grows and because it is so small you don't hear it until it gets bigger.  She was sent for an Echocardiogram and that was when they confirmed that it wasn't just and "innocent murmur" but an actual heart defect.  Some murmurs are just a sound but there is no defect, this is what they call an "innocent murmur".  She was then referred to a cardiologist at McMaster Children's Hospital and the rest is history.  It took some time but eventually she was diagnosed with the Aorta to Left Ventricular Tunnel which means she has a tunnel from her Aorta to her Left Ventricle.  When blood is pumped from her Left Ventricle to her Aorta and out to her body some trickles back through the tunnel and makes her heart work a little harder.  Tomorrow she goes for her annual Echocardiogram and appointment with the cardiologist.  My hopes for this appointment are that we are told that there is no real change to her heart and that they decide it's time to repair before permanent damage is done.  The repair will hopefully be done by a catheter inserted through her wrist or groin.  It comes with some risk but much less than open  heart surgery.  To this point Adryanna has had little change and little damage has occurred   That will not always be the case and while she is doing very well, with no restrictions, that could all change with one simple cold or one flu.  

Hopefully in the future more and more children will be diagnosed early and less innocent lives will be lost.  Until then it's important to raise awareness.