Ella's heart

My poor baby girl was getting congested on Friday, and I thought Hayden  had just passed her cold onto Ella, so I took her to the doctor on Monday.  The doctor didn't like the sound of her cough and called the hospital to get her checked for RSV.  She was given a breathing treatment before we left.  We had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance because she's only 3 weeks old and they didn't want any chance for her to stop breathing.  I really thought they were over reacting a little bit because she had been just fine, she just had a cough. 

Well, we got to the hospital and she was doing fine.  She was given 3 more breathing treatments through the night and then all of a sudden at 2am a doctor rushes in to check her.  Her heart rate was at 300 beats per minute.  A bunch of other people rushed in and then they rushed her to the PICU.  I had no idea what was going on and Will had gone home to spend the night with Hayden. They worked on Ella for about 2-3 hours to get her heart to stabilize. She was given about 14 doses of a medicine to convert her heart back to a normal rhythm.  Finally she was given a drip medicine then another dose and it worked.  

Turns out that she has a heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome.  She went into supraventricular tachycardia.  

All of that basically means it is a heart condition in which there is an extra electrical pathway (circuit) in the heart. The condition can lead to episodes of rapid heart rate (tachycardia).  

Turns out my dad has the tacycardia too.  She'll be on medicine probably for the rest of her life, but she can live a full, active, normal life.  Which I'm very thankful for.  All in all, scariest night of my life.  We're still in the PICU because she's now on the oral medicine, Propranolol, that she'll  stay on most likely for years.  They have to monitor that for about 48 hours to make sure she doesn't have any other episodes. As of right now (9pm, 2/16/11) she has 2 more doses (every 6 hours) of the Propranolol before we're able to talk about going home.   

The Albuterol breathing treatments are what triggered her heart since Albuterol makes you all jittery and causes your heart rate to increase anyway.  I guess in a way I'm thankful that she got the breathing treatments, otherwise we wouldn't have known that she had this.  On top of this, she does in fact, have RSV too, but they don't need to do anything for it.

Thank you for the prayers, she really needs them.

Here she's getting her echocardiogram.  It showed that her heart looked good thankfully.

Her little sweet cheeks with heart stickers to keep her oxygen on.

All wired up

Her splinted arm and leg

Sweet baby off of oxygen