A Year Ago Today...

This time last year Chris and I were sitting in a waiting room at Fairfax INOVA for Tatum to come out of surgery...Talk about one of the worst days of my life!!! I remember it seemed like forever that she was in there and that darn pager they give you seems to never work right. After a long 5 hours or so the surgeon came out to speak with us. He said in his 25 years of surgery he had never seen anything like Tatum before, neither had his PA. He informed us for the first time that instead of a co-arch ( what they originally thought she had) her entire descending aorta was small. While she was open he only tied off her over sized ductess (PDA), there was no correction to the aorta that could be made at that time. I never in a million years thought anymore would come of it and certainly not all this.

I was thinking, ok we are through this maybe a surgery when she is 5 and we'll monitor her untill then...LOL what a joke, that is what I get for thinking.

As the year has pressed on I feel almost as if i have been to medical school. I know realize that there is so much more to the heart problems and all else we have found out along the way is just trivial at this point.

Kind of ironic that our little heart baby is also a valentine girl. She was the only little girl in the PICU at the time so she received tons of attention and gifts. We knew then she was our special little girl already just melting every one's heart. Maybe St Valentine is Tatum's little angel that keeps her moving forward and doing so well...Well that and her very special Grand Dad Angel always looking after her. How lucky we are to have so much love around.

This is a picture of our little chunk the day she was born. I finally got to hold her for about 5 mins the 2 day and then not again until the day after Valentines...What a great belated gift...
We sure have come a long way, doesn't even seem like the same baby anymore :)