Cardio Follow-Up

Hurrah! We made it to our cardio follow-up today with a great weigh-in. FINALLY! Our cardiologist (pictured here with Abby) has always been very honest about how serious her weight gain (or lack of it!) really is and today we got a great report. Her pulse/oxygen levels were great and EKG was good too. We also did an echo. Because Abby's heart has been enlarged due to the hole making it work extra hard for all of these months, it's going to take some time for it to return to a "normal" size and also for a set of valves to adjust. At this point, the valves are a little "leaky" but we expect that to fix itself as her heart functions better and better. Her lungs sounded so good today that he lessened her dose of the medication to dry out her lungs from twice a day to once a day. Yes!

We also met Matthew -- a little guy who was having an appointment the same time that we were. He had his surgery a year ago, at 4 months and around 9.5 pounds -- pretty similar to Abby. First of all, you can hardly see his scar anymore....and his mom gave a glowing report about how by the time he was 8 months old, he was back to where he should've been for weight. I don't know if our little peanut will rebound that quickly, but Matthew was a big ray of hope for how quickly these little guys recover. In fact, you can see from the picture that her scar is already unbelievably different than it was 2 weeks ago (when she had surgery).

Seeing that Abby can't lay on her tummy till early December, she'll be a bit delayed with holding her head up most likely. This will slightly delay her ability to sit up and start crawling....but long before her first birthday, our cardiologist assures us that she will be "up to speed." She'll be playing soccer, racing circles around us...and if she wants, running triathlons by the time she's older. Good job, Abby.... keep on eating, girl!