my daughter's story

This blog has never been a personal blog, on occasion I have blogged photos of my kids, but I have not shared much of our personal life.  Many of you are aware and many are not that over the past month, my family has gone through fear, tears, love, and laughs.  My 4 year old daughter, Kyndal Grace, had open heart surgery on Valentine's Day to fix a congenital heart defect that we partly knew about right after birth and another one that we found just one year ago.  When she was born, she had a large hole in her heart that was fixed with a titanium device in the cath lab and Children's Hospital Colorado.  She grew and thrived after that procedure.  Despite her doing well, she always had issues with fatigue and leg pain with activity.  We found through cardiac MRI last year that she had an intramural coronary artery which is a defect that causes sudden death in athletes.  We were under the plan that she would have open heart surgery to fix the defect when she was 7 or 8 years old.  In December of last year, she had chest pain and fatigue at a birthday party at an inflatable bounce house.  It was determined at that time that she needed immediate surgery to fix the defect.  At the same time of her surgery they repaired a known leak at the site of the device.  When they went in for surgery, they found that she had the intramural coronary artery on both sides of her coronaries.  This basically told us that she was "a ticking time bomb" for cardiac arrest with the next activity involving exertion.  She has made a wonderful recovery and is doing quite well only four weeks after surgery.  She has a pericardial effusion (fluid on her heart) that we are closely monitoring with weekly trips to Children's, but despite that she is returning to her beautiful, spunky self, something we could not feel more blessed about.

I took several pictures with the plan to document her journey and in order to share it with those who care for us, I made a video.  I hope you enjoy watching how we went from one of the darkest days of our lives to days full of smiles and feeling so very blessed to have such wonderful doctors, family, friends and most of all such a strong little girl......ENJOY the link below.

http://youtu.be/mJksD3YHC_U