Mixed news from the cardiologist.
May. 26th, 2006 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaAlex's heart murmur is "innocent," as her pediatrician suspected, meaning that nothing is really wrong and it will probably go away on its own, in time.
However.
There was an abnormality on the EKG. According to the cardiologist, it could just be a normal variation. Or the left side of Alex's heart could be slightly enlarged. She's going to need an echocardiogram to be sure. The test is noninvasive and innocuous - it's just an ultrasound of the heart - but because they'll need her to hold still for an hour, she'll have to be sedated, which in turn will mean that she'll have to fast for six hours, a long time for a baby. But it's okay. We'll get through it.
The cardiologist repeated what Alex's pediatrician said - that if she had any kind of serious heart disease, we would know because she would be weak and growing poorly. Even my greatest maternal paranoia can't apply either of those terms to my tall, pot-bellied, active little girl. But honestly, anything short of "your daughter's heart is perfectly normal" is not something I can feel okay about hearing. I am not panicking, but I am going to be worrying about this until we get through the echo.
I've just spent fifteen minutes or so with Dr. Google, and have figured out that we're probably talking about hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an inherited condition in which the heart muscle cells have an abnormal arrangement. Apparently a lot of people never even have any symptoms, and only find out about it when a family member gets it and they test out the rest of the family tree - or it's diagnosed incidentally because they're looking at, just for example, a heart murmur. Other people have symptoms like shortness of breath or chest pain with exercise, palpitations, light-headedness. Some people develop serious heart disease, but that doesn't seem to be very common. Sometimes hypertrophic cardiomyopathy requires treatment with drugs or surgery, but peope with minor or no symptoms don't need any treatment at all.
We could deal with that. If we had to.
However.
There was an abnormality on the EKG. According to the cardiologist, it could just be a normal variation. Or the left side of Alex's heart could be slightly enlarged. She's going to need an echocardiogram to be sure. The test is noninvasive and innocuous - it's just an ultrasound of the heart - but because they'll need her to hold still for an hour, she'll have to be sedated, which in turn will mean that she'll have to fast for six hours, a long time for a baby. But it's okay. We'll get through it.
The cardiologist repeated what Alex's pediatrician said - that if she had any kind of serious heart disease, we would know because she would be weak and growing poorly. Even my greatest maternal paranoia can't apply either of those terms to my tall, pot-bellied, active little girl. But honestly, anything short of "your daughter's heart is perfectly normal" is not something I can feel okay about hearing. I am not panicking, but I am going to be worrying about this until we get through the echo.
I've just spent fifteen minutes or so with Dr. Google, and have figured out that we're probably talking about hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an inherited condition in which the heart muscle cells have an abnormal arrangement. Apparently a lot of people never even have any symptoms, and only find out about it when a family member gets it and they test out the rest of the family tree - or it's diagnosed incidentally because they're looking at, just for example, a heart murmur. Other people have symptoms like shortness of breath or chest pain with exercise, palpitations, light-headedness. Some people develop serious heart disease, but that doesn't seem to be very common. Sometimes hypertrophic cardiomyopathy requires treatment with drugs or surgery, but peope with minor or no symptoms don't need any treatment at all.
We could deal with that. If we had to.
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Date: 2006-05-27 09:29 pm (UTC)Oh - the transition from sedative to actually sedated was wild. He was so physically restless, we nicknamed him Mr. Flippy. It was as if he was somehow trying to outrun the meds. It was quite an effort to restrain him so he wouldn't hurt himself. And then, all of a sudden, he went out like a light.