In the beginning.....

I was born Thursday October 17th 1985 at 2357. I was pronounced a healthy baby girl by all medical staff at Good Sammaritan Hospital right outside of Pheonix, Arizona. How very wrong they were.....

I was sent home a couple days after birth with my Mom, Dad and Big Bro. Everything seemed copacetic. That was until i was 23 days old. I was rushed to the hospital, heavily cyanotic. My Pulse and Blood Pressure was practically none existent. You could see my chest heaving up and down struggling to get air into my lungs. Now, does that sound like a perfectly healthy baby girl? I didn't think so.

 The doctors ended up placing a chest tube to regulate my breathing and to drain the fluid build up from my lungs. After that they needed to crack open my rib cage to really see what kind of distress my lil heart was truly in. They noticed that the small hole in the center of my heart that all babies are born with never closed. Not at all. They frantically had to find a way to redirect my blood flow, and seal up the gaping hole in my septum. I was diagnosed with a Ventricular Septal Defect. So instead of my heart having 4 different chambers to pump blood through, it only had 3.

On top of that i had cardiomegaly which is the abnormal enlargement of the heart. Mine happened to be where my left ventrical is. So they finished repairing the septal wall which would now be dividing my ventricle in to its regular left and right sides. As they completed that portion on the surgery they realized that my Aorta didn't look quite right as well. But that was just another surgery, because they couldn't keep the heart muscle flat lined for too long, fearing mental retardnation or death.

I was in and out of Phoenix Children's Hospital many times during the first two years of life....