SLC Trip

This morning Frank woke me up around 5:00am and said he thought Alyson's breathing rate was different than it normally is. When I listened to her she seemed normal to me but Frank said that her fast pattern breathing was lasting longer than normal. I grabbed the stethoscope to listen to her heart thinking she could be having arrhythmias. Well, her heart didn't sound like it was beating any faster but sounded as if it was skipping some beats here and there. We called the on-call cardiologist and he said that as long as her heart rate was over 100bpm he wasn't too worried but would still like us to go to SLC to have her checked out. When we got to the hospital she was hooked up to an EKG machine to check her heart activity and see what was going on. Sure enough, she was having a little bit of a block causing the missed beat and also had some tachycardia as well meaning fast heart beats. The tachycardia she was having was nothing like the arrythmias she was having a while back. The cardioligist decided that they should do an echocardiogram to check her heart functionality to see if anything was happening to cause her abnormal heart rate. Once the echocardiogram was done and read the cardiologist said that everything still looks the same from the last one she had done before she left the hospital. So in other words, nothing worsened which was a relief. They felt she was stable enough to send home because her outward appearance looked great and she seemed to be handling everything okay. They sent her home on a little heart machine (its about the size of a wallet) that will track her heart rate for 24 hours. Once she has been on it for 24 hours we will take it off and send it back to the hospital by FedEX for someone to read the information they got from it. Its unbelievable how great technology is these days. Unless they see something concerning in the report they will wait until we have our next appointment in a couple of weeks. At that time they will see if they need to increase her medication, add a different medication to the one she is already one, or change it completely.

We are so thankful and blessed she was able to come back home with us today. Even though I had the feeling that everything was going to be okay I thought of how sad it would be to have to leave Alyson in the hospital that day. I also thought of how much Olivia would miss her sister and would probably wander around the house looking for her. She loves her little sister so much! We are also grateful that her echocardiogram still looked good and that her surgery was still successful and nothing worsened. These things add just a few more things to my list of things to be thankful for during this Thanksgiving season.

Alyson's weight today was 9lbs. 10oz. She is slowly but surely gaining weight!!!