Problems

Ellie slept and ate an awful lot and didn’t seem to be gaining any weight, so we went back to the Dr’s and she had dropped to 5lbs 15 oz. So they took a listen to her heart and discovered that she had a heart murmur. We were then sent to Casualty (or the ER as they like to call it here) where they were expecting us. We were transferred into the Pediatrics Emergency Room where they did loads more tests.

They confirmed that there was a problem with her heart and so we were moved to the Pediatrics Intensive Care Unit (P-ICU) from there they did loads more test and we met another 4 or 5 Dr’s. In fact in the space of 24 hours I met more Dr’s than I have ever seen in my whole life.

The upshot was that Ellie’s left bottom chamber of her heart was too small and too thick (sounds an awful lot like the thing my 1st ever rugby coach said about me), with the outcome that it wasn’t pushing enough blood through which was putting more pressure on the right side of her heart. The only way to solve this problem is through open heart surgery but there is a procedure where by the enter through her groin and put her balloon into her heart and “pop” open the chamber to see if that would help. Normally they could do this procedure and operation in Sacramento but the surgeon was on holiday so we were going to be transferred to San Francisco.

To take the pressure of her heart they inserted a breathing tube into Ellie, they put an IV drip into her arm and they stopped feeding her. This was horrible to see and my beautiful little girl was turned into some horrible creation from Wes Craven’s next movie.