Anyway, they confirmed what we already suspected and then talked about treatments and implications. Baby B's heart has 2 problems rolled into one.
The heart on the left is a normal heart. The heart on the right has an atrioventricular septal defect (AVSD). There's a hole between the 2 bottom chambers of her heart. So, the oxygenated blood mixes with the de-oxygenated blood and isn't sent to the right places. ADDITIONALLY(not shown in the picture), her left ventricle (which pumps oxygen rich blood to the body) is too small to work properly.We already knew the left ventricle was too small. We didn't know about the hole between the ventricles. The small ventricle is the more serious problem. The surgeries correcting that will correct the AVSD, too.
She'll need 3 surgeries - the first before she comes home from the hospital, the second when she's 4-6 months old, and the third when she's 2-3 years old.
She's fine as long as she's still in my tummy because she gets extra oxygenated blood through the placenta. She'll be blueish when she's born. She'll be taken to Primary Children's NICU and cared for there.
-45% of kids with down syndrome have AVSD - ...so we'll put that in the maybe category.
-for reasons unknown to me, kids with congenital heart defects have to brush their teeth more often to prevent infections in the heart valves.
As an added bonus, the cardio team threw in heterotaxy (situs ambigous)--some of her organs are on the wrong side of her body. My perinatologist looked carefully at it today, and thinks it's more likely that she has situs inversus which is where all her organs are reversed - a mirror image of where they should be. This would make our twins "identical mirror twins". We just keep hitting all the low odds! (Haqon wants me to buy lottery tickets!)
heterotaxy would require surgery to make sure there's no danger of intestinal blockage. Situs inversus is kinda cool but not a problem - lots of people have it w/out even knowing it. The biggest problem is your symptoms are on the wrong side of your body. So you could be telling your doc about pain from appendicitis, and he might think it's nothing serious because your pain is on the wrong side for it to be appendicitis.
So...they explained all of this to us.....and then asked us if we'd take a test to determine our stress level. LOL. I don't know about Haqon, but I scored pretty high :)
Thank you for your support and prayers--it means a lot :).
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