On August 20, 2011, we welcomed into our family a beautiful baby girl named Valerie. She weighed 5 lbs. 4 oz. and was 18 3/4 inches long. She was born 4 weeks early because of low fluid. On Sept 20th, I took her for her 1 month check up and all went well except her tummy was still distended like it was at birth so we started 1 oz prune juice to 1 oz water and she said she had an odd shaped head. On that Friday we got a call to bring her in because her doctor wanted to check her before the weekend. As she was doing her exam she stopped while listening to her heart and said “ok now don’t get worried or alarmed but I think its the type of heart murmur kids out grow but I want to get it checked out.” So she sent her to DuPont Hospital in Fort Wayne because DeKalb Hospital does not have a pediatric cardiologist. So we went to get an echo-cardiogram done the following Wednesday.

While there, they found a partial blockage. They rushed us to another hospital to talk to the pediatric cardiologist and from there to St Vincent’s Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. She had open heart surgery the next day. The reason for the surgery was she had a partial blockage in the main vessel of her heart. They did the surgery at noon on a Thursday and we were home the following Tuesday afternoon. The next night we were giving her a bath and took the bandage off the drain tube site only to find out it was infected so we had to take her to see her pediatrician the next day and she put her on an antibiotic.

At her 4 month appointment the pediatrician told me she needed surgery on her skull. So on January 3, 2012 we went to Indy to meet Dr Floras and Dr Boaz and they said she had to have a sagittal cranio reconstruction so it was scheduled for the 18th of January.
On the 18th she had her surgery at Rile Children’s Hospital in Indy at 9 am and everything went good. Overnight they were giving her a unit of blood and morphine and she quit breathing. They called code blue and started to intubate her and she started breathing. They then rushed her into a CT Scan where they found a blood clot on the left frontal lobe of the outside covering of the brain, so they rushed her into the OR right away.

We were there for a week and came home. When we took her for her post op appointment on February 14, 2012 the surgeons were pleased with the way things were going and said see you on April 1st. When we took her to that appointment they were once again pleased and we don’t have to go back to see them till October 6, 2012.