Baby You've Come a Long Way Part Deux...

It's been a pretty crappy year, so I have tried to hold on to the good things that are in my life and hold on to the gifts that I do have. One gift that I will always treasure is my precious Sophia. She is the reason I keep up this blog, she is the reason I worry tirelessly and she is the reason I will fight. I will fight for her, for her sister, for anything I believe in because of the fight I saw in this little girl. It was three years ago today, that I handed my one week old baby girl to a gifted surgeon in Seattle. He was going to open her up and fix her precious little heart. Three and a half hours after I handed her off, this is what I walked into.

This was my baby girl. For a week I had to stand by her bedside until they closed her chest and then finally removed her chest tubes.

Three years later and two more trips to Seattle, here is a healthy, happy three year old.

While there have been bumps..heart rates that dipped into the 80's (I had to stay at the hospital with her because you had to wake her when this happened to get her heart rate back up), a blood clot that developed after the surgery (twice a day lovenox shots applied by mommy until she was four months old), a Medivac trip back to Seattle to have a stent put in (thank God for not rescheduling that appointment) to one more trip in January 2010 to have the stent inflated...there have been may happy moments too. Learning to ride a bike, blowing bubbles, running around the yard playing with her sister, spending quality time with her papa! There is still so much ahead for this little girl, both medically and non-medically. She will need to have her stents replaced, she continues to take blood pressure medication (how many three years olds can swallow a pill with water...this is better than when she used to chew them :( , and I will continue to worry every time she is a fussy eater, runs out of breath easy or seems to have low energy. I push all of that aside because I know there is a special angel looking out for her and that I was chosen to be her mom for a reason!