Another Big Day on the Horizon

Teddy had an echo today. It wasn't great. He's fine, but he will probably need surgery in the next 4-6 weeks. Friday, his cardiologist will present his story at their weekly conference. They'll discuss the case and Dr. Stivers (his cardiologist) and Dr. Galantowicz (his surgeon) will decide what to do. There's like a 5% chance that they'll do something with tiny balloons to help easy the pressure around his aorta and put off surgery, but it probably wouldn't do much good. So we're probably looking at another big day in the hospital sometime in the next 4-6 weeks. They'll want it as soon as they can. 

For those who don't know, here's a picture that our cardiologist has used to describe what is wrong with Teddy's heart:

In the upper left, there's a normal heart. There's the aorta on one side, and the pulmonary arteries on the other. In the middle on the right, there's Teddy's heart as it was at birth. There's the big central artery (the truncus for which truncus arteriosis is named) and then there's the pulmonary arteries that come off it, rather than coming from the heart. When they fixed that and put in a conduit from his left ventricle to his pulmonary arteries and made the truncus into more like a normal aorta, part of that was fixing his heart valve at his aorta. That valve does not grow as he does, and so it needs to be replaced. On average, we can expect 4-6 years for a kid's heart valve, and this one is at about 5 and a half years now.

So now we're waiting to hear when the surgery is scheduled to get that valve replaced. When I know more, I'll let anyone who still reads this know right here.