Of Cones and Toes

Patrick enjoyed a routine visit to the Cardiologist this afternoon {“enjoyed” may not be the right word…but he was fairly brave and tried to curb his indignation, tears, and requests to “go back to the gold car.”}

P’s troublesome ticker looks pretty much the same as it did in July. While there is no imminent danger, we will need to do something {in coming years} to reduce the amount of blood that regurgitates into the atrium–enlarging the right side of his heart. Dr Rhee feels that a surgical procedure called a cone repair will do the trick. The idea is to move the three leaflets of the tricuspid valve up where they should be and reshape them into a cone.

Before doing a cone repair, the surgeon(s) will probably want Patrick to get older/bigger. In the meantime, they will call us in soon to do a study on his heart to see if he still has electrical pathways in his heart that could cause SVT (rapid heart rhythms). If SVT is still a potential problem, then they’ll do a low-risk catheter ablation to get rid of the SVT pathways. Both the study and the cath procedure would just be overnight procedures (so that they can monitor him after he’s been under anesthesia).

In other news, we are loving our new house (will share photos in the near future) and getting excited to meet the soon-to-be fourth member of our family. My due date is May 1 and so far the baby is healthy and whole. We had a fetal echo done in January to take a close look at his heart–it looked totally normal. The only item of not was that Patrick’s baby brother has 12 toes! The better to kick me  with, of course…