Ohhhhh… the waiting game. So we had the first ultrasound, found out it was a boy, and was told that he may have hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The ultrasound was right after lunch on a Tuesday and neither of us went back to work, instead we spent the rest of the day on the internet looking up this mysterious (to us) syndrome, referred to from here on out at HLHS. I will save much of the detail for the About HLHS page but to sum up our fear a quick Google search returned the following, “5-year survival of approximately 50-60%.” Wow, I kept reading, and kept reading. It’s not all doom and gloom, I did find a lot of good resources and a lot of success stories. Again, we were assuming that we were not the 1 in 3000 and the ultrasound, just 6 days away would ease our mind. We didn’t want to worry people if it turned out to be nothing so we did our best to keep it relatively quiet, although that’s not one of my strong suits. 🙁 I did manage to keep it from my family, I really didn’t want them to worry unnecessarily, they are already extremely stressed and I didn’t want to add to it.
Here’s a simple image of what HLHS means. The “purple blood” in the image on the right means that the oxygen rich and oxygen poor blood are mixing in the heart, this is normal in utero, but within several days of birth this pathway naturally closes, at which time a baby with HLHS would go into heart failure.
