Warrior of the Heart: Heart Murmur :(

So Abby had her first Christmas and was still having severe colic so we decided to take her to a Pediatric Gastroenterologist. He told us she had a heart murmur that should have closed by that time and we should take her to see a Pediatric Cardiologist. He referred us to Sanjay Parikh with the Children's Heart Center at St Vincent's in Indianapolis. So we set up some tests and had them done in Fort Wayne and a few days later I got a call that it was not just an innocent murmur, Abby had what was known as CoArctation, which basically meant that the part of her Aorta which took the oxygenated blood to the rest of her body was narrowed by muscle and it needed to be repaired immediately. On February 27, 2007 we checked Abby into the Children's Heart Center in Indy and they took her for surgery. It was the hardest and most heart-wrenching moment of my life watching them take my daughter down that hallway knowing that there was a chance I might never see her alive again. My mom, Chris and I went to the waiting area and about 3 hours later we finally were called by the doctor. Abby's surgery went excellent, they went in behind her shoulder and cut off the portion of the Aorta that was narrowed and sewed the 2 ends back together. She had a drainage tube just below that area on her back. So we were told where she was going to be at and when we got to the floor the nurses told us she was having trouble breathing while coming out of the anesthesia. So we had to wait to see her for about another hour and FINALLY they came out and told us she was stable and we could see her. I can't even explain the feeling when I saw my 2 month old daughter laying in that hospital bed with all those wires and tubes attached to her. But she was doing well, her eyes were open and she was fairly alert. All those were good signs, so we just sat with her and talked to her. Her surgeon stopped by the next day to check on her, and she had SUPER nurses.

Another Pediatric Gastroenterologist came in to check Abby and see if she could find out what was wrong, and they used a tube to try to empty the air from Abby's stomach and that didn't work. She wasn't crying as much in the hospital, but when we got her back home she was the same. At that point we didn't know about the Williams Syndrome and that it was the root cause of the colic, heart problems and everything else.

Eight days later Abby was released from the hospital and we took her home. She did well after the surgery, never had any problems other than the colic. We had to take her back a few months later for follow-up scans, and in August 2007 they did an angioplasty to make sure the aorta stayed open.

In September Abby came down with pneumonia and did an overnight stay at Dupont Hospital. They thought it was probably from the angioplasty. She got better and things started to normalize a little bit. She was eating better and although the colic was still bad, she was sleeping better and at least a little longer.