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Well, where do I start? I just got home from the hospital with our daughter, who was hospitalized on July 20 for an epsiode of SVT. We learned that she has a congenital heart defect called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. There’s a great article here that covers these conditions. Luckily, she responded well to medication (Amiodarone), so she’ll keep taking that until she’s older and can have a surgical procedure which will, essentially, cure her of this condition.

Unfortunately, she did suffer a few complications during her experience. In the emergency room, the drug that finally got her heartbeat under control caused her to crash, so she ended up being intubated before being life-flighted to the major regional children’s hospital, and was on a ventilator for her first few days in the hospital. They also had a lot of trouble starting an IV in her (tiny, month-old veins combined with dehydration and poor profusion as a result of SVT = a very hard stick), so she was pretty bruised and battered from their attempts. Epinephrine that was injected through an IV in her ankle ended up infiltrating her foot, which made it turn purple and caused us to worry she might lose it for a few days (luckily, it recovered completely). And the central line they eventually put in her left leg caused her to develop clots. One of them has already resolved, and we’re currently giving her injections of blood thinner twice a day at home until the remaining clot is completely gone (hopefully this will only take six weeks or so).

It was a scary couple of weeks. We stayed at the Ronald McDonald house near the hospital, since it was pretty far away from where we live. I appreciated being able to stay so close for nearly nothing, but the strange bed was hard on my back and I missed my cat!

The happy ending to all of this is that we’re home with our precious baby. And she’s not hooked up to monitors and IVs and other equipment anymore, which is awesome! As I type this, she’s sleeping peacefully in her bassinet, and I’m looking forward to finally sleeping in my own bed. Oh, and her appetite is terrific – she managed to gain at least a pound while she was hospitalized! She’ll be six weeks old on Monday, and I feel like I aged a few years over the past two weeks.

There’s no place like home.