I try not to express my medical worries about my kids over the blog until I have definite answers so I haven't really offered up this information before now and thankfully I can write about this without tears in my eyes because despite the worry and fear Jonathan and I felt for a short period of time, the answers were good ones.
I am sure you all remember in June of 2011 when Justin had his first (and only one we are aware of to this date) febrile seizure. While he was being evaluated the day following the seizure, the pediatrican noted that he had a murmur. He asked if we had ever been told of it before, and we had never heard of it before. He let me listen to it, and I could tell exactly what he was referring to. Since we were six months away from Justin's 3-year well check, he suggested that we just monitor and re-eval at the 3-year visit. During that visit, they could not hear the murmur at all. Our pediatrician explained that there was a normal murmur heard a lot in children (especially thin children) and it was typically just a normal echo of the blood flowing through the cavities of the heart so we weren't going to stress about it. I had almost forgotten about the incident all together by the time his 4-year visit came. Then we were sitting there during the exam, and I noticed the pediatrician spending A LOT more time listening to Justin's heartbeat.. a lot more than normal. Before he could even say anything, I asked him if he was hearing a murmur. He said he was actually. Justin had a little bit of a cough that week, and it seems that it is when he is sick that they tend to hear his murmur more. Our ped hesitated, trying to decide if it was significant enough to send Justin for a cardio eval, and he explained that it was probably normal but that he would rather play it safe and have us go.
When we arrived at the cardiologist's office today, I wasn't that concerned. Our pediatrician is excellent at playing things safe so I wasn't that worried that we were going to hear anything other than it was normal. I started worrying when the cardiologist even spent more time listening than what seemed normal. After listening extensively, he explained to me that Justin actually has two heart murmurs. One is the completely normal one that we had been hoping for. The other sounded like Justin had a hole in his heart. My gut sank to the floor about then. To make matters worse, we just had a friend whose son (age 6) had a stroke due to an undiagnosed hole in his heart so that's all I could think of. He wanted an echocardiogram ordered to confirm his suspicions and thankfully they were able to do it that day. I had texted Jonathan and we were both just so sick to our stomachs awaiting those results.
Since this is already a storybook, I will skip all the points of the echo and get straight to the end. Justin does have a hole in his heart (a VSD.. ventricular septal defect), but thankfully it is not one that can cause him any complications in life. He said that at the very most it makes him a little higher risk for an infection of the heart, but that is super, super rare and fingers crossed, Justin's still has time to close up. We are hoping that by age 6, it will be closed up anyway. We will return in two years to repeat the echo and see if his has closed.
Here is the picture we were given to show where Justin's hole is in his heart. If it were larger, it also may be an issue but Justin's is very, very small.
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