Echo echo echo....

I hate echo days. It's all that I can think about.

Will Charlotte sit still long enough for them to get a good look at things? What will they see? Will the right side of her heart have grown any? Will her shunt still be working well? Can we hold off even longer for surgery? Will something be wrong?

UGH.

Well, at 12:45 today I got my answers.

Yes, Charlotte was really good for the most part. I gave her a bottle right before hand and that seemed to hold her over. She got a little restless at times, but it was pretty easy to distract her so that they could get pictures of everything they needed.

As for her heart. It was another good report. Things still seem to be holding up well from her first surgeries. The echo did show that she is starting to grow out of her shunt....which we kind of expected since she is double the size that she was at the time of surgery. Luckily, she does have some blood flowing out of her right ventricle, so her O2 sats have stayed really good to this point. Dr. Sami did say that it doesn't appear that the ventricle has grown any since her last echo 2 months ago. This isn't bad news...but for some reason it feels like it. After our last visit when he DID see growth, I felt like I was on top of the world. I just KNEW that this time it would be the same...that we would be even closer to them telling us that Charlotte could in fact have a whole functioning heart. And again, as many times as I tell myself not to get my hopes up, I still do.

So the plan is for Dr. Sami to present Charlotte's most recent echo to the surgeons and cardiologists at Children's next Monday to see how they want to proceed. They could decide that they want to do a heart cath to get a better feel for what's going on inside that crazy heart of hers. They could decide to let her keep hanging out since her sats are still good. We'll just have to wait and see. Needless to say, its going to be a long week of waiting.

Big prayers....