Here is an email that I sent out from Aurora
October 24, 2008
Today we had an appointment at the Children’s Hospital at 11a.m. We had an echocardiogram performed and then met with Dr. Fonseca. The echo came to the same conclusion as the last; they are not 100% positive of a diagnosis. They still believe that it a coarctation of the aorta, which is a narrowing of the aorta between the upper-body artery branches and the branches to the lower body. We know the left ventricle is as long as the right ventricle but not even close to as wide. This will result in surgery. The baby will be fine after birth until the surgery as long as he/she gets medication to keep the PDA vessel open. The surgical procedure will be to remove the narrowing and attach the ends of the detached vessels. They are hopeful that the left ventricle will be able to be saved and that after the narrowing is removed the heart will be back to full strength. This defect is commonly accompanied by other deformations in the heart but so far everything else looks fine. If the left ventricle is not able to function efficiently then the heart defect will be a classification of HLHS which will require a much longer road with many surgeries. We are very hopeful that it is simply a coarc. After the appointment we visited the CICU, cardiac intensive care unit. It was very impressive but also very hard to visit. There were quite a few babies in their beds with tubes hooked up everywhere. I have seen pictures before but the shock effect doesn’t hit you until you see it first hand. We now must wait until Tuesday when Lindsay sees the high risk ob doctor to determine if we can schedule an induction. We thank everyone for their thoughts and prayers.
Joshua and Lindsay