Little M’s Heart…

Last month we heard that things we mostly unchanged with little M’s heart…her pulmonary valve has moderate to severe leakage, and that valve will need to be replaced. The goal is to wait until she is around 12 or 13, so that she only needs to have this replaced once, with a larger valve. Her left pulmonary artery, the artery going from her heart to her left lung is very narrow (stenotic), so narrow that it is making her heart work harder to pump blood to that lung through this narrow vein. This means that she has lost a good deal of that lung’s capacity, and her heart is enlarged from working so much harder.

So right now our little M needs some intervention…in just over two weeks she will have a sedated MRI to get a better image of her valve, and a measure of her ventricles. Then she will have a heart catheterization, and they will plan to place some stents in the pulmonary artery leading to her lung, to try to open it up, and give her better oxygenated blood flow to that lung, buying her time before she needs that valve replaced…

We never like our kids to have to endure any surgical procedures, and heart kids are always higher risk, and of course that is always going to make this mommy nervous…

So… we will do this thing! Our girl goes in on the 28th. This is her first cath, but she has watched tiny P rock her way through eleven of these things, so she knows we are in good hands.