A Lesson in Medicine!

Here's little recap of Madelyn's heart defect for anyone who may not really know what she has. I tried to break it down into Layman's terms. :)

Tetralogy of Fallot

Involves 4 defects:

-Overriding aorta (the aorta is in the wrong spot basically, shifted to right over them middle of the two chambers rather than just attached to the left side.)


-A large VSD (A hole between 2 chambers of the heart, allowing oxygen rich to mix with oxygen poor blood.)

-Pulmonary stenosis (a narrowing of the valve that leads to the lungs, so blood doesn't effectively get oxygenated.)

-Right ventricle hypertrophy (the right side of the heart gets bigger b/c that muscle is working so hard to push the blood through the narrowed valve.)

The open heart surgery she had at 10wks put a fabric patch in the hole in her heart and removed some of the blockage in her pulmonary valve. It is a miracle that anyone could do a procedure like that on an organ smaller than a walnut.

I find medical stuff like this fascinating, and I learned as much as I could about her condition so I could talk to the dr's and really know what was going on with my baby. It made it easier on me to know the facts.