Appointment recap

Mighty Margaret brought out the big guns (read: lungs) at her appointment today.  We headed to the Heart Clinic for a post-cath check-up and it definitely was an exhausting one!  

Oh my gosh, you guys.  Screaming. So. Much. Screaming!  Today's echo was the worst yet.  I felt awful for the techs -- that's right, techS.  after Margaret started screaming a second tech came in to try to help calm/comfort her.  Nope.  Margaret just wasn't having it today.  They did their best and we took several breaks to try and help her regroup because she was crying so hard that her lips would turn blue.  Not cool, Margaret!!!

We finally gave up and I'm positive the images they "got" were terrible.  Thank goodness Margaret has such an amazing team and her cardiologist knows how sassy she is when it comes to these appointments.  It's kind of hilarious, though, because the SECOND the techs stopped trying to put the wand on her chest, she immediately stopped crying and was smiling at them.  When the cardiologist came in, Margaret was happy and smiley.  Such a little flirt.  She behaves so well for him and it's such a relief.  

Margaret's heart is functioning well overall. Her right ventricle pumps abnormally, which is expected with the restricted size of her pulmonary arteries downstream. But, the pressures in her heart are ok albeit the one measurement they were able to get showed very high pressure (remember: screaming). Her cardiologist is happy with her O2 sats and is comfortable with monthly checkups from now on until the next heart cath will need to take place. Margaret is on a low dose of medication to help keep her heart pressures down. We are expecting her to have another heart cath before the end of the year. The goal is to delay her next surgery as far out as possible, without allowing the pressure levels to damage her chambers.  We do not have an anticipated timeframe for when to expect to be back at Children's for the next procedure.  For now, we get a month pass and will just go appointment by appointment until it's time.  We didn't get to make any adjustments to her current medications as her cardiologist put it, things are working right now, her sats look phenomenal and we don't want to rock the boat.  Our job into check sats a few times daily and call the clinic if Margaret does anything "weird" like gets puffy or starts dropping her sats again.  We got this.

 

**sound asleep before we even got out of the parking ramp.  Mighty, indeed. 💕