Congential Heart Conditions

Congenital Heart condition. this is a statement no parent is ever ready to hear. Yet it is far more common than any one realizes. At twelve weeks you are told about your options to test for downs and numerous other tests. Yet a heart condition. Well if it is caught in the 20 week ultra sound they talk to you about it. But what if you are like me, gone your entire pregnancy with out a blip that anything is wrong with your baby. In fact in the hospital nothing ever seemed wrong with my son except he was a bit more blue than expected. I kept being told this was normal and would even itself out. Then at four weeks old we went in for our typical well baby check. It was February 18th. i will never forget it. I will never forget being told he had a murmur and that it meant there was a hole in his heart. That was a lot to swallow. I had just become 1 in a 100. More accurately my son had just become 1 in a 100. One in a hundred babies are born with a CHD. yet not a single doctor tells you the warning signs or the importance of a pulse ox test. Low oxygen rates are associated with a congenital heart condition. Many are serious. Others are more minor like my sons. How ever the day I became 1 in a 100 I knew I would never stop being shocked or stop speaking about the importance of pulse ox machines and the mandatory testing that must be done. or that nearly half of babies born with a CHD will need open heart surgery before they are a year old. 1in 4,000 won't survive to see their first birthday. How do we change these facts? Sadly the stats on how often a baby is born with a CHD has not changed much. that more than likely is going to take tons of research and many many tests. The heart is a complex organ and many factors go into why a heart is created correctly or not. Another thing is that when a baby is created in the womb the heart is the first thing created. So before a woman even knows she is pregnant the baby's heart is already developing.

So the reality becomes how do we change what we can immediately. Education. The pulse ox test is that little strip that they put around the baby foot and test the oxygen level of the blood. This will not catch all CHDs but it will catch the most serious ones and the ones that need immediate medical attention. There are few false concerns with this. If the oxygen level of the blood is low it is worth looking into. They will do an Echo which is just an ultra sound of the heart. I say that it is worth it. Not all babies will have a murmur. Some like my son it can take days or weeks even to show a murmur. Some even more serious conditions don't always have a murmur.

My son was born with a Ventricular septic defect and a small narrowing of one of his pulmonary arteries. we got very blessed that when we became 1in a 100 that we got a simple issue. But there are many others that are not that as blessed and it is so important to keep educating and letting people know that the most common defect in a baby is a heart defect. we have to let people know the importance of pulse ox tests. they are cheap and reliable.