Doctor Visit

Yesterday we went to Children's Hospital for Comforts first visit. How wonderful they are! I called them from Ghana on Friday while we were waiting for our flight and they scheduled us to come right in on Tuesday morning (Monday being a holiday). The doctors were all excited to see Comfort and really interested in her. The condition that she has is usually diagnosed early in the states and surgically repaired before it progresses to this stage, so it was very interesting for them to see it at such an advanced stage. The defect that she has is an obstruction of the outflow of blood from her heart going to her lungs. Because of this obstruction her heart muscle has to work extra hard to squeeze the blood through the restricted opening, this in turn has thickened and enlarged the heart muscle (think of what lifting weights does for your arm muscles) which causes the obstruction to become more restricted. Without surgery, eventually it would have completely obstructed and she would not have survived, which probably would have been soon from what it looked like. We also found out that because her heart has become so large it has moved her liver 3 inches lower than normal. She really did need to get here to have medical care. The doctors were so surprised at how advanced it was.
The prognosis is good though. The doctor is meeting with the surgical team to plan her surgery and then they will open her chest and fix the obstruction and remove the enlarged tissue from the heart and that will allow her liver to move back into a normal position. We were told that she sould have a completely normal life.
The doctors were so great. They were also very attentive and interested in her case. they kept coming in and talking about her and looking at the monitors. I think they were really excited.
Comfort was so funny. She was really worried that we would be going to a hospital like the one in Ghana and the first thing she said when we left was "Mom, that hospital was really nice". Isn't that funny that she would even process that? Maybe it was the teddy bear, stickers and movie? Oh, and the really cool thing was we met Kristin http://thejagfam.blogspot.com/ and her kids while we were at Children's. How cool!!!
After our taxing day at Children's we took our little princess to lunch. What a contrast. 3 weeks ago she was living in an orphanage struggling to survive in the heat and now here she was sitting in a waterfront restaurant eating calamari and loving every minute of it.
Brian and Josephine are also doing great. Everyone is sleeping well, eating great and seem to be adjusting really well. We are all happy to be together finally. It was a long wait!
Lanae