Conor's Heart - part 1

Conor has a congenital heart defect. Here's the first part of the story - it is too long and crazy for one blog post.

About halfway through my pregnancy with Conor I had a regular OB checkup where they found that his heart beat would randomly skip a beat every now and then. My doctor sent me off to have a fetal echocardiogram to see if they could figure out what was going on with him. Conor had pretty much zero interest in cooperating for the echo. He kept his back firmly turned to the sonographer and they weren't able to get a good enough picture to do the echo. They still looked at him as well as they could, though they couldn't get any great pictures of his heart. Towards the end he was dropping every fourth heart beat, but they said that as far as they could tell everything looked good structurally. The doctors put it down to him being extra sensitive to caffeine in my diet and said I just needed to avoid caffeinated drinks (fine) and chocolate (less fine). Fast forward a few months and everything was fine, I was having weekly checkups to monitor his heart rate, but as long as I was not eating any chocolate everything seemed normal. Then one day I went in and his heart rate was being super erratic. I got strapped up for a non-stress test and his heart rate was flying all over the place, from 102 to the 170's. Of course the doctors didn't like that so I headed back down to Columbia to try for another fetal echo. This time Conor was in a great position and they were able to get a good look at his heart and decided that everything looked how it was supposed to. By the time they were done with the echo his heart rate had normalized and they told us to just keep on keeping on with our weekly check ups. When I got home I remembered that Marc had been drinking a cream soda the night before and I had taken one sip of it. I fished the bottle out of recycling and saw that it had caffeine in it, so we put his crazy heart rate down to that accidental caffeine intake.

Like I said in his birth post, he ended up having more weird heart stuff going on when I thought I was in labor with him, so we decided we should get him out just to be safe. I had an anterior placenta with him, just like I had with Finn, so I already couldn't feel him moving very frequently and by the end of my pregnancy I was feeling quite a lot of anxiety that something bad was going to happen to him if he didn't come out soon.

While in the hospital we delivered in the nursery performed a simple test for CHD. He failed it, but they just kept trying again until they got him to pass it. Marc and I were both a bit uncomfortable with that, especially since he'd had all those other heart "episodes" in utero. Because he had a bit of jaundice the hospital wanted us to take him in for a check up within two days of getting home. We decided that we would ask our doctor about doing further investigations into his heart weirdness.

We took him in to see his regular pediatrician on the 7th, when he was four days old. I love our doctor and nurse, we've been seeing them since we moved here when T was about 16 months old. As soon as our nurse, Miss Karen, brought him back to start getting his weight and length she noticed that his color was off. He was quite upset with getting undressed and weighed and when he started screaming his mouth area was getting dusky and bluish. It is definitely not something I would have noticed, in fact I couldn't really see much of a difference when it was pointed out to me, but luckily for us Karen has over 30 years of nursing experience under her belt and knew what she was looking at. We got back in an exam room and she started a monitor for his pulse oxidation right away. This was the same test he had originally failed in the hospital. His numbers were all over the place. Sometimes they looked fine and other times they were terrible. She brought the doctor in and they both watched the monitor for a bit and then left. A few minutes later they came back and told us we needed to take him straight to the ER.