Great Medical News!

Mommy, Daddy, and I braved the elements today to go to Children's Hospital to have my heart checked. Jonah got to stay at Auntie Jodel's so he could play in all the wonderful (and plentiful) snow!

When I was born, I had many heart issues which required open-heart surgery. And although the heart surgery was considered a success, my heart still has a couple of problems that we monitor. First, I have a small leak between my two lower chambers which is no biggie. It means I have a heart murmer and will for the rest of my life. Lots of people have them and don't even know it. My second issue is my Mitral Valve which is what we are monitoring.

I have a deformed Mitral Valve (MV) that "regurgitates" blood from the lower right ventrical to the upper chamber. This can eventually cause pressure to build in this upper chamber and would cause the heart to swell. Most of the time, MV's in kids that are regurgitating blood will eventually correct itself as a child gets older. My regurgitation is actually getting worse as I get bigger. For example, my last visit in February to monitor this showed mild regurgitation but the visit today showed that it had become a mild to moderate regurgitation.

This sounds bad but actually it is good news. The regurgitation is not progressing rapidly as we had feared and we are now just going to continue to monitor it. We were fearful that if the regurgitation had shown rapid progression, that we would be preparing for the possibility of heart surgery to fix it. But because my MV showed a slow progression of regurgitation, there is a good chance that no medical intervention will be necessary at all !!! That is the good news!

We will continue to monitor my heart with my pediatrician for the year and then I'll go back to Children's next year to re-assess my MV. If it progresses again, we'll try some medications to fix it but it looks like no heart surgery any time soon! Hooray for me!