Doctor's Visit

We had a visit with Sam's cardiologist today. Sam did great this time, and stayed still, quiet, and smiley through the whole thing! Everything looked great! The cardiologist is decreasing the lasix a bit, but the blood pressure medicine stays. In fact, the blood pressure medicine is apparently a forever thing. He also started us on aspirin, which will also be a forever thing. This kind of bothers me. Not that it's difficult to give him medicine. I just hate the thought of putting medicine in his tiny body and him being on any medicine long term. I don't know...I guess whatever keeps him happy and healthy is fine.

Chris's mom is in town so she got to come. The cardiologist was great and spent a lot of time talking to us and filling us in on the plan of action for Sam. He said that even though the surgeon said we would have Sam's next surgery at age 2, the reality is that we will wait as long as we can. He said that could be anywhere between age 2 and 6. That's great news to us! The bigger, the stronger, the better!

He also talked more about long term stuff. Once again there really isn't a lot of long term data for the outcome and side effects of these surgeries. Once Sam has the second surgery and officially has a "Fontan Circulation" system, he will be at risk for side effects involving random organs and other such things. Dr. Cardis said that there is a wide belief that all kids with "Fontan Circulations" end up with heart transplants at some point. Scary. But we knew this coming in. It's why we saved his cord blood. We're placing our bets on some pretty amazing stem cell research (NOT embryonic stem cells...cord blood is stem cells too) and technology to save his life some day...and I have a feeling it will. If we can make it another 20 years before we need a transplant, and current data says we have a good chance of that, then there is no telling what new technology will be available.

All in all, I am slowly starting to feel like Sam's life will be longer than we were originally prepared for by our doctors. And not just long, but full AND meaningful. You will never know just how warm and uplifting that realization has been for us.

~Kathy