The doctor picked up a murmur during a routine check, so she ordered an EKG to confirm her suspicions. From there to a pediatric cardiologist, and he explained today that Little Shawn has a hole between his ventricles. VSD, ventricular septal defect.
The good news is that it’s not sever. Somewhere between mild to moderate. About 30% heal on their own within a year. The not good news is that they won’t know for another month on actually how bad it is.
Apparently before a baby is born, the lungs have a high degree of resistance to the blood flow in order to restrict the flow. It takes about a month for the resistance to decrease. Because of that, the right ventricle now has higher than normal pressure, so there isn’t much flow through the hole. Once the resistance in the lungs decreases, the pressure will drop in the right ventricle and so more blood will flow from the left ventricle to the right.
Possible complications include pneumonia as the lungs can get filled easier with fluid. Normal colds can become dangerous. This is a concern since babies pick up colds a lot from daycare.
I’ve done research online, and was able to take in printouts in English and Japanese to our meeting. The doctor was pretty good, and patently answered our questions.
There isn’t much they can do at this stage, and we’ll have to wait for another month to see how bad it is. The doctor said it’s too early to speculate on possible treatment, but is optimistic that things should go well.
My wife and baby will come home tomorrow. My wife is handling this well now.
But, damn it. I didn’t want to have another education on birth defects.
VSDs are a pretty common heart defect, and many of them close without intervention. As far as congenital heart defects go, a VSD isn’t terribly bad. Of course, a lot will depend on how big it is and other factors. The fact that it is causing an audible murmur at such a young age might actually be a good sign, in that small VSDs cause louder murmurs than large VSDs because a small diameter causes the blood to flow more rapidly through the defect. Smaller VSDs will spontaneously close more readily than large ones.
IIUC, those holes (bigger or smaller) are actually ridiculously common.
Back when I was little, nobody checked the hearts of people under age 40 unless they had specific reason to; certainly not as part of routine checkups. A friend of mine was crazy about basketball, and a very good player (short, but good enough to be able to make it, there’s been professional players his height); he got offered a position in the training team of one of Spain’s pro teams, but the doctor found a hole like that during the medical checkup. Do not move, do not ever play sports again, spend the rest of your life sitting down. Those of us who knew Michel looked at each other and went “uh? Dude’s nuts, getting Michel to sit down is a lot more likely to kill him than letting him go on bouncing.” Michel’s now 43 and coaches a local basketball team. May TokyoShawn’s heart be every bit as sickly as Michel’s!
I was born with a VSD in 1961. Doctors kept telling my parents it would probably close on its own, but it never did, and I still have it. It has not impacted my ability to do anything anyone else would do. When I told my cardiologist I was planning on running a marathon, he asked me about my training regimen, then told me to have fun (I ran the marathon last November). The fun thing is seeing the expressions on the faces of doctors and med-techs when they listen to my heart. Typically, they bring every nurse and tech in to listen to it, as my murmur is quite loud and they don’t encounter murmurs that loud very often.
I used to work in a peds cardiology office (IANAD/N), and agree with the previous posters. I know this is hard news to hear right now, but if things go as they often do, there’ll be no indication that he ever had a problem other than a very boring yearly checkup with the heart doctor. In the meantime, I’ll be crossing fingers and thinking thoughts of VSD closure.
Yes, I know that things should be fine, it’s just a shock reaction when you hear it for the first time.
Reading more, it doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal. Still, we are concerned that there aren’t any other development issues. They were never able to pinpoint the disease that Ian had, so there’s a lingering doubt.
Still, Anya seems to be perfectly fine, and this could very well just be a simple, straightforward defect and not an indication that there is worse to come.
My youngest daughter was born with a fairly large perimembraneous VSD, leaky valves, and a very large PDA. They repaired the PDA when she was an infant but waited for the VSD. When she was 10 she was part of a case study for a new surgical procedure to repair VSDs. That was almost 7 years ago and luckily she is one of the few that did not develop heart rhythm disturbances from it. You would never know she had a thing wrong with her now. She still sees her cardiologist annually and takes prophylactic antibiotics for dental and some other procedures but that is about it.
I know it is a worry for you, but I am sure all will be well. Keep us updated.
I was born with VSD that didn’t heal on its own. I developed more slowly than my twin sister the first year of my life, and my mother took great pains to make sure I fed as well as I could. (I got tired from feeding, so my mom would feed me, my sister, and then me again…a lot of feeding when you have twins!) At one year old, they operated on me to close the hole between the heart chambers. I am now 29 years old, recently graduated from a PhD program and do any physical activity I have a mind to do. I am perfectly healthy when it comes to my heart, and don’t even need to take prophylactic antibiotics. I’ve never had any complications associated with the VSD, and my sister’s VSD healed on its own without any surgery necessary.
Birth defects can be scary, but I hope hearing this from one more person makes you feel a little better!
Thank you everyone for your kinds words of support. And thank you defecthunter, Jaded_Goddess and starryspice for your personal experiences. I told my wife about [bdefecthunter** running a marathon, and it helped her feel better.
There isn’t anything to do about it now, so we’ll wait for the one-month check-up and will see how it goes.
I think it should be good, and it was just the initial shock of a hearing there was a birth defect, especially since it was the heart. However, it could have been much worse.
I’m sorry to hear this, and I am sending you many happy healthy healing thoughts - they are like “sticky” thoughts, but have to do with the edges of the hole sticking together to heal. Hang in there - this WILL pass!
My mother discovered she had a VSD when she was in her 70s! Coincidentally, I just mentioned this in the blood pressure thread in IMHO. It was quite a surprise. Even when she was born in the 1930s, it was considered rather routine to fix, but no one had noticed it. She had been a very active child and teenager having been on high school sports teams and such. It had never been discovered, not even during regular pre-natal check-ups when I was to be born via c-section. The doctors said that had she been in her 30s, they would recommend repairing it, but as she was in her 70s and had lived her life totally unaffected all this time, they were inclined to just leave it be and so left the decision up to her about whether or not to have corrective surgery.
At the time I started an IMHO thread “To Fix or Not to Fix” out of curiosity to see what other medical types tended to think. In the end, she opted not to bother getting the hole repaired. At the age of 75, she gets a little winded going up and down he stairs, but that’s attributed to some other medication that is unrelated to the hole in her heart. She is still a very socially active adult, and always has plans of some kind. Most people underestimate her age by a decade or more.
My eldest adoptive sister has this defect, and is in her 70’s. She worked on a farm all her life, healthy as a horse, and has always had way more energy that I have had. That said, healing prayer headed your way, and rest for you and your wife.
Thanks again for the encouraging stories and messages. It really looks like people can live healthy lives with holes in their hearts. Who knew?
I don’t know how we would have reacted had this just been the first time, but being gun shy, I got an oh-no-not-again feeling of panic.
It really is comforting to hear of people living into their 70s without needing surgery.
We’ll hope for the best for the one-month check up.
The kid in question is doing fine. Sleeping a lot more than his older sister did at this stage, although he seems to think that we would prefer to be up with him during the middle of the night.
As a soon-to-be-(as in, a week to 10 days from now)-first-time-father, I, too, appreciate the posts to this thread. While I am sorry that TokyoPlayer has to go through this uncertain and rather scary episode, I am reassured to see that many defects, even to an organ as vital as the heart, can turn out to not be a big deal.
We went into today for a one-month checkup and the good news is that the hole is getting smaller. They doctor thinks it’s likely it will clear up on it’s own.