Cardiology

Last Thursday Rebekah took Jed to his appointment at the cardiologist. We had scheduled an echocardiogram because we needed a clearer picture of what condition his heart was in. We knew that he had been born with an atrial septal defect, that it had been operated on last year, and that's about it. We had a stack of medical reports in Mandarin, but in none of them does it ever say what exactly his procedure was or what they did.

So we needed an echo, and for that to happen, Jed needed to be able to lie still for about an hour during the test. I'll pause for the laughter to die down.

Clearly that wasn't going to happen, so the doctors would need to knock him out for the test. And that meant that we had to wake him up at 4am to feed him breakfast so that his stomach could be nice and empty by the time his appointment happened.

Rebekah and Jed went to the appointment, where they slipped Jed some chloral hydrate (the same stuff that's in a Mickey Finn, I've been told) and did the test. That's some powerful stuff. I came home to find Jed completely stoned out of his gourd. He wasn't able to walk until about 7 that night. Even his baby babbling seemed slurred.

The echo gave us some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the surgeons in China did a fine job repairing his defect. They also put in some stitches near his mitral valve.

The bad news is that there's still a bit of a hole in his atrial septum, so blood's still able to pass between the two atria. Apparently this is in a place in the heart that's really hard to see, which explains why the surgeons missed it. It means that Jed's going to need another procedure to take care of that. The doctor told Rebekah that it's not an urgent thing; it would be good to take care of it before Jed turns 5 because he'll heal faster when he's younger. They'll need to perform a cardiac catheterization to scope the place out first and then operate to plug the leak.

All told, this is good news. He'll need about a week in the hospital, and then he'll be free to do as he likes for the rest of his life. We have a follow-up appointment in 6 months and then we'll decide when to do the surgery. We'll wait till after Disney World.