Cardiologist Follow-up

As many of you know, Dallin had some heart issues when he was a few months old that were resolved. The cardiologist wanted to do a follow-up with Dallin 6 months later to see how he was doing, and yesterday we went to said follow-up appointment. The nurse started by doing an EKG and Dallin did not like it at all. He had one when he was 3 weeks old and he cried then, but he was too young to squirm and try to get away. He did not like having all these little stickers on his skin that were being pulled. And he had to sit still long enough for the machine to take an accurate reading of his heart. He did not want to sit still.

And then he would stretch out his body like this:

and it would rip the stickers off and the nurse would start all over again.

Finally we got him calm enough to get a good reading. The cardiologist came in and said that the EKG looked good. She then asked me some questions about how he's been doing. I told her about his eating habits and his slow weight gain, and I showed her Dallin's growth chart. (Dallin's pediatrician was especially eager for Dallin to see the cardiologist again because she thought Dallin's weight issues might be related to his earlier heart issues.) The cardiologist listened to Dallin's heart with a stethoscope for a minute. Dallin really like her and stared at her calmly while smiling the entire exam. After listening to his heart, she said that she could still hear a heart murmur and the narrowing in his pulmonary valve. This information combined with his low weight led her to suggest a blood test. She wanted to do a chromosomal analysis for a particular genetic mutation that might explain these problems he's having. She said the lab could take about 3 weeks to come back and then she would let me know the results.

I was surprisingly calm through all of this and a little relieved. I'm glad that someone is really exploring his weight issue instead of saying that I'm just not giving him enough calories. Obviously, I'm not happy that his heart problems are still there since I thought his heart was just fine now, but I'm glad that it might be a sign to indicate what could be going wrong. I don't think it's really anything serious. He's been living fine, happy and relatively healthy these past 11 months. But if we know specifically what is going on, then we can know how to go about helping him gain weight (possibly through growth hormones) and fixing his heart. Regardless of the outcome, he's still my sweet little boy. For now, I'm just going to keep doing what I've been doing.