Heart problem

Today Amy and I had our cardiogram. The doctors found a heart defect. The official term is truncus arteriosus, which means that the aorta and the pulmonary arteries aren't differentiating like they should. He has a rare form of this defect, which is, in fact better. Normally, the left side of the heart is the problem side, and the pulmonary arteries don't develop. He's got the other way around. So he'll get plenty of air, and won't be born blue (which is what normally happens the other way). It means that after he's born we'll have to go in for surgery at Children's, and he'll probably have to have several more over the course of his life to replace the artificial valve and piece of artery that they'll be grafting in. However, of all the possible things that could have gone wrong based on early ultrasounds, this seems to be much better than it could have been.

One thing they were very firm about was to not go crazy looking this up on-line. Apparently, not everything on the internet is true. Beyond that, because this isn't the common case, what you find may not even apply, even if it is a reliable case. Their advice was that we should look at Children's Hospital, CHOP (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) and places like the National Institute of Health. We'll keep people up to date as we know what's going on here, but this is, while not great news, better than we were expecting to hear several months ago.