Okay, I hope I get all the facts straight, but I'm not exactly positve about some of them, so sorry. When I was born, I had a heart defect called Pulmonary Stenosis. (As I was told about this) Pulmonary Stenosis, or in my case at least, is when you have a hole in your heart. Now, everyone has a hole in their heart when they're born, but as you grow up it closes. Mine didn't. Already my sister and I had broken medical records, before we were even born. Neither of us were supposed to live. My heart was failing from pumping all the blood, and she was suffering from malnutrition (or something like that). My mom was told by the doctors that only one of us could live, and that she should abort one of us. She refused. Instead, she researched for a while, trying to figure out ways to save us. Finally, she heard of an experimental laser surgery. I'm not exactly sure what the laser surgery did, but it worked. So right there is one way we had already broken a record. When I was born, I was taken to PCMC (Primary Childrens Medical Center). I had several problems going on, but the main one was my heart. One of my valves was too narrow, and I was in serious trouble. So, they had to preform a valvuloplasty. Basically, what that is, is they take a really little balloon thing, and they put it in your veins and they get it into the narrow valve in your heart, and they fill up the balloon so it will stretch the valve and make it bigger. I'm not exactly how young I was, but my mom would always tell me I was the youngest baby to have the procedure done. After all the complications, I got to go home. (I think it was like a month later, not sure though).
I grew up with a normal childhood, playing with barbies, fighting over them with my sisters, playing imaginary games. All the things little kids do now, except watch shows like Adventure Time.... That show is freaky... *Shudder*. Anyway, so I grew up normal, except for the regular cardiology exams. Every year or so I would go in and they would run tests to make sure that my heart was doing ok. For a while it was. Around 2005ish I suddenly got really tired all the time, and really sick. I would get these horrible migranes, and I would never go outside to play with my sisters cause I would never feel up to it. My mom was getting really worried, so we scheduled an appointment with my cardiologist. All I really remember from that? A lot of tests.
Anyway, so basically they told me I would need to have surgery. Now, being a 8 year old kid and being told you need surgery. It kinda freaks you out. I never got too worried because my mom was always there teliing me that things would be fine, but still. It was kind of scary. So on February 2nd, 2006, I had my heart surgery. It was nothing too major it wasn't open heart surgery, but every surgery has it's risks. Anyway, so in the surgery, they took a device call an amplatzer, and brought it up to my heart through a vein in my leg. The device, once opened up, is kind of like a double ended umbrella, only much, much smaller (obviously). The surgery was sucessful, and after about 6 hours recovery time in the hospital I went home. After a week or two at home (during which, one day my teacher stopped by my house to bring me balloons and cards from the class, it was so sweet!), I got to go back to school, and life pretty much returned to normal, except that I was no longer constantly tired, I wasn't sick, and I didn't get migranes. Now, 5 years later and I'm still doing good. This blog post was originally supposed to be about changes I've been making in my life, but I think that would make it quite a bit long, so we'll save that for another day. I'm so grateful for everything I've been given in my life, and to all the people at PCMC for helping me, and other children.
No comments:
Post a Comment