Cardiology Update

I am finally getting around to blogging about Arianna's cardiology appointment. I know some of you already heard a little bit about it on Facebook.

Well the night before her appointment we practiced doing an EKG because it's been since she was 5 months old since her last one. Arianna was a little apprehensive at first but at the end she was asking to do it again and again.

Practicing with some stickers and string

The night before Arianna's appointment we made cookies for the doctors and nurses. Arianna just loved handing them out to the nurses. Sorry the pictures are blurry.

We waiting for an hour and a half before the doctor came in and it wasn't even our doctor. Last time we had this guy come in our room I told him I wanted to see our doctor and that was that. Well I asked about Dr. K (our doc) and he said it could be awhile till we see him so I decided to go ahead and let him proceed with the visit. It doesn't hurt having 2 docs taking a look at her. He has never meet Arianna so he read over hear chart then did his exam.

He said her heart murmur sounds the same as is written in her chart from 6 months ago. Thank God! He wanted to get an echo but I told him "our" cardiologist wanted an EKG done at this visit so he decided to go ahead with that instead.

She did okay at first since we practiced but after 3 or 4 minutes she was ready for it to be over.

After the EKG was done the doctor reviewed the strip and said her QRS wave was a little bit longer than normal. However, children with a tetralogy repair never have a "normal" EKG anyways. I guess the QRS wave looks alot worse on paper than it measures out to be. That being said he wants Arianna to have a 24 hour Holter monitor done to see if she is having any arrhythmias because that is common in tetralogy patients. I'm actually really glad they are doing this because there are no major signs of arrythmias and alot of children with tetralogy have died from them. I'm still waiting for someone to call me about getting the monitor so I will probably give them a call tomorrow to make sure they haven't forgotten about us.

So we were leaving the clinic and about to walk out the front door when I hear someone yelling my name. It was the cardiology nurse. She said Dr. K (our doctor) saw Arianna's name on the board and he wanted to say hi to her. :) That made my day so we rushed back to clinic and spent a few minutes with OUR doctor!

Arianna just LOVES this man...and so do I! He asked how her summer was going and what she was doing. She told him about bowling, swimming and her cousins. lol! I told him about the EKG and the Holter and that I'll be emailing him when she gets it off so he could take a look at it. At this point there is no need to stress about anything since this is just a precautionary test.

As far as other things going on, we meet with the school district this week to have our transition appointment for preschool. Basically it was all about getting her paperwork in order and telling them about her medical issues. Now don't get too excited...she probably won't attend preschool but we wanted to see what the school would offer her for therapy since she is being cut off at 3 years old from the Arizona Early Intervention Program. We have to go back for testing in the next few weeks so see if she even qualifies for special education preschool. Right now we are just looking at possible speech therapy being the only need for her. :) Which by the way, this week was her LAST speech therapy session! So I'm not sure if she will even qualify. We will just have to wait and see.

Friday we see the immunologist so that will be interesting. I'm praying for a wonderful report!