Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Heart Surgery and Miracles - Updated

Baby A's heart surgery is scheduled for Thursday morning around 8:00 our time. According to the docs at the hospital in DC, it's considered a fairly routine procedure, they do hundreds a year and she should be able to travel back home in about a week, good as new.

I have to admit that I'm a bit unsure how I feel about that information. On one had, how awesome is it that medicine has advanced to the point where doing an arterial switch on an infant is considered routine???

One the other hand, how frightening is it that a transposition of the greater arteries (that's the official name) is common enough for the procedure to be routine???

I've done some reading on the condition over the past couple of days (I really shouldn't use the internet at times like these!) and it seems that in most cases of children with TGA the body creates additional heart defects during gestation that compensate, allowing the blood to mix and provide oxygen somewhat closer to properly. In cases where it doesn't, the infant usually dies within minutes of birth. Nobody's quite sure how the body knows to do it, it just does. Just another miracle of creating life, folks. And in my book, miracles only come from one place. We're praying that Baby A comes home soon, good as new.

And for the record, I'm not calling her Baby A for any reasons of anonymity. I just don't know the correct spelling of her name. While watching The Little Mermaid on Monday I realized that it's the Sebastian pronunciation of Ariel, the three syllable version. Like Air-ee-al. Only they spell it with a y somewhere and an extra e, I think. If I can find out the correct spelling, I'll use it.

***And no sooner than I posted that I realized that I could probably find it at one of the racing forums they frequent. Sure enough, there's an entire thread dedicated to updates and good wishes for the baby, including an earlier message from Brad with this comment:

"aireyal is doing good.. except for the doctors cant pronounce her country ass name..

air-ree-AL is how we pronounce it.."

UPDATE: The surgery went fine, she's recovering and should be good as new in a week or so.

5 comments:

Stacey said...

hahaha @ "country ass name"

This is great news, but yes, at the same time horrifying.

Supermom said...

glad to hear the update is positive... I was wondering what the latest was...

From the Doghouse said...

Let us know how things come out with the surgery.

Susan said...

She should be out of surgery soon, they said it should take about 3 hours. Don't know how long until we hear something but I'm going to check the forums for an update in a little while.

And Stacey, Brad's about as country as it's possible to be, so that's about normal for him.

mayberry said...

Hallelujah!

I so needed some good news today.

I've been praying and I'm so glad she's doing well.