Little Sammie’s Heart

Long day. Good news.

The appointment was at 10AM.  She couldn’t have anything to eat after 6:30.  Go ahead. Just try to explain to a toddler some day why you won’t feed her when she’s hungry.  Fortunately, Sammie’s pretty easy going and also easily distracted.  Around 8:30 or so we packed her into the car and drove around a very long way, trying to think of a store to go look at that might be open at 9am.  We went to Sears.  We looked at almost everything there. Eventually we got back in the car and drove over to the doctor’s office.

The closer we got to the doctor’s office, the more upset Sam got. Finally she said, “I scared!”  Awwwww. Poor little thing.

We didn’t really tell her there was anything wrong with her heart.  Our thinking was that she was 2 years old and the less she had to think about, the better off she was.

Then the other day we were at the pharmacy picking up some migraine medicine for me. Matt paid for it while I kept the kids under control. As the pharmacist came over to Matt, Sam pointed at him and said, “Doctor!” followed by, “Mommy’s doctor!”  I said yes, that was the doctor and then reminded her that she had seen a doctor recently (this wasn’t that long after her first cardiologist appointment.)  She got a serious little face and said, “Yeah, Sammie heart” and she pointed at her chest. We figured out then that the nice daycare ladies had told her that her heart had a boo boo but that it would be all better.

She was pretty nervous until we got into the waiting room and got her coat off. Then she was too distracted by the books we brought and the tv that was there to be nervous about what might happen.

The first thing they did was weigh her to determine the amount of medicine it would take to get her to sleep.  The little bitty thing weighted 23 lbs, 13 oz.  That’s pretty tiny for a two-and-a-half year old kid! Then the nurse did the usual other tests: looking for bunnies in the ears (temperature check), checking the muscles (blood pressure), etc.

Then it was time to give her the medicine.  She was a real trooper and took both syringes, even though it had a nasty after taste.  She got loopy. She started to babble. She sang.  She pointed around, but didn’t have good control of her arms.  It was like getting a toddler stinking drunk.  She really fought the sleep and towards the end was just flailing around and screaming. We were doing our best to hold her so she wouldn’t hit her head on anything, but for someone that small, she was really hard to manage. We would have lost the battle if it had been Jessie. Just before she fell asleep she was just sobbing. It was so sad.

And then she was out. We carried her off to the ultrasound room, which was frighteningly familiar, given the number of ultrasounds I had when I was pregnant. She was so out and peaceful, which seemed such a stark contrast with her little heart beating so wildly on the screen.

The good news is that they can fix it by going through a vein, rather than through open heart surgery. We were hoping to get it done as soon as possible, like this summer, but they want her to be 35 to 40 pounds first, so it’ll be another year, probably two before she’s that big.

Thanks goodness for good insurance.  If we’d had her a few years earlier, who knows what would have happened. It is insane to me that her health care should depend on the insurance that is completely dependent on what type of job her parents have.  I went most of my adult life without health insurance. The job I have now is the first one I’ve had that came with benefits.  I just can’t believe that folks in this country are arguing about health care insurance and who should and shouldn’t get it.  Because if I’d had kids at any of my previous jobs, we wouldn’t have had insurance and would have been very unlikely to take the kids to see the pediatrician unless they were very ill or only for their annual exams.  The heart murmur was the only sign of a problem. We found it at an exam for an ear infection. And who knows if we would have actually followed up with the cardiologist without insurance? We thought it was just something she’d outgrow.  I get so angry when I hear people saying that the country is going down the tubes because we finally got a little health care reform (and it isn’t enough in my opinion, but it is a start). My guess is that the folks complaining are not people who have had to set their own broken bones.

Advertisement