Luna's bi-annual cardiologist check-up.

Miss Luna, 20 months old.


This past Friday I took the girls to Luna's cardiologist appointment. At this stage in her young life, she sees the card every 6 months; and most likely, once she gets older, and has her surgeries behind her, she'll see a cardiologist once a year.

She was weighed, measured and sat checked.

On all fronts, she is doing fantastic. She's now just at the 40th percentile in weight, tipping the scales just past 24 lbs. For height she's 30 inches and her sats are at a nice 85 percent.

I wish I had thought to bring my camera, I think she may have been one of the cutest echo patients (biased, I know:)

Now that she's a big, talking 20 month old; it's easier in that she can communicate her needs to us.

A sampling of the dialog went like this:

Cindy the echo technician:

"Does this hurt?"

Luna:

"Yes"

Cindy:

"How about this?"

Luna:

"Nope, it tickles".

This type of repartee went back and forth for some time.

To give you and idea of how long these appointments take, we; Sienna, Luna and I watched the entire movie Aladdin, and then one full episode of Max & Ruby.

The results of the echo were very positive: the LPA (left pulmonary artery), the one that she needed the balloon catheter for, sustained it's 'puff' and is looking great (thus provides nice blood flow into her heart).

Her heart function is good.

And this was a bit of interesting information: we learned her aorta, since she has grown, has more room to 'breathe'. Some background on Luna's aorta: back when we were first diagnosed, we learned that she has a big aorta (never judge someone by the size of their aorta...sorry, really bad heart humor). Well, apparently it was SO big that her little body was squeezing in on it, which in turn could affect her heart function. Now that Luna is bigger, her aorta has more room, which may also contribute to one of the reasons that we're not seeing her sats falling at this point (which normally, due to growth and increased movement in heart kids, you will see sats fall in the year or so between the Glen and the Fontan surgery).

The only big upset of the appointment is that we learned Luna's surgeon took a job at Columbia. We *could* go down to NYC for her Fontan (ha, ha, ha), but we've decided that there are other top surgeons at Children's Hospital Boston who could do the job.

With the Big Appointment behind us, we can now exhale and enjoy the holidays. Luna's next scheduled appearance with the cardiologist will be in April. It will be then that her team decides when she goes in for her third and final repair, the Fontan.