And what a whirlwind these past eight weeks have been! Parts of them have flown by, and some minutes have seemed like hours. From adjusting to a newborn at home and becoming a family of 7 (it still blows me away that I have 5 kids!), to a week in the hospital, and learning about Crew and his likes, dislikes, and little internal schedule as he is home and recovering.
This is a day after coming home from the hospital (he’s off of oxygen now)-
And yesterday when he turned eight weeks old-
Isn’t he cute (I might be a little biased)? And do you see that slight hint of red in his hair?!
We went to his follow-up appointment with cardiothoracic surgery on Wednesday. It didn’t go quite as I had expected. They took his weight (he’s gained almost a pound since he’s been home – you can even tell from looking the pictures above), checked his vitals, did a chest x-ray, and did an echo to check his heart function. Then you meet with the doctor. Instead, three doctors came in, and each one examined him. They then left the room and came back a few minutes later. I would have bet they were going to tell me everything looked great. Instead, they told me that Crew has a new heart defect called coarctation of the aorta. They reviewed all of his past echos, and it didn’t show up at all. It had developed in the past nine days since he had been home. This is super rare (as Crew’s heart apparently is) to develop it this late. The echo showed it was fairly severe. Normally, they would have admitted him and planned for surgery to correct it. However, since Crew wasn’t showing any severe symptoms during examination, they wanted to wait a few weeks since there is a 5-10% chance it will correct on it’s own. And since surgery is more likely than not, they felt the extra few weeks would help him build up some strength and reserve and maybe he’d put on another pound or two before they most likely have to operate again.
I’m not sure why this sweet baby has to go through all this, but it’s okay. I don’t need all the answers. I just need to have faith. And I do. I have faith that Heavenly Father’s Plan is perfect. And this is part of His plan. In the meantime, we’ll love on him as much as possible. :)
