SHANE, OUR HEART JOURNEY

  Congenital Heart Defects (CHD) something that is so common, but you never hear about it.When I got married at 22 years old my husband and I were both going to school and working so having a child right away was not on our list. We waited awhile before we decided it was time to make that next step and have children. We were both healthy young and thought like everyone does our baby will be born healthy we will have no sleep or an idea on what we are doing but love it! After trying a year we were thrilled to get pregnant.
   We were starting our next phase in life and everything was falling into place. My husband was graduating from college and few week later I was due.

He was also due to start a new job in January just a month after the baby was born. Everything was falling into place. I had a normal pregnancy, I was sick during the first trimester, great in the second, and uncomfortable in the third. I worked my whole pregnancy almost up to the day I delivered.:) life was great!
  I delivered my precious baby boy Shane on December 19th,

his delivery was a little rough at the end but he came out a healthy baby. He got jaundice very early and was put in NICU for that but he was able to come home with us just a couple days later. I thought that was rough... Oh what I didn't know was the thing called CHD that I never heard about was soon going to come into my life. We were all together for Christmas spent time alone at our house away from family. We got some visitors and christmas dinner brought to us. Shane was a good baby, nursing was difficult for him but took bottles like a champ!
  The next day in the afternoon he stopped eating which was very unlike him... After a couple feeding of not eating and him breathing weird we rushed him to the ER. After about 30 mins at the ER we were told he needed to be life flighted to primary children's hospital because they couldn't find what was wrong and they weren't able to read much on him. By the time the helicopter got to the hospital our little lifeless 8 day old baby no longer could breathe and was put on ventilator before he could go into helicopter. All the nurses and doctors kept telling us was he didn't have rsv ,but he was a very sick boy. I said goodbye to my little baby Shane not knowing if I would see him alive again and watched the helicopter take off on its way to Primary's.

  We were told that Shane had several heart defects. A pinched aorta, (coarctation) ASD,VSD (holes in the two chambers of heart. We also were told the left side of his heart was not pumping well. After his first heart surgery he did not rebound as the doctors hoped he would. This is when we were sat down with other doctors and social workers and  we were told he would have a 95% chance of needed a heart transplant. That meant  only a 5% chance of him not needing one. Shane kept proving the doctors wrong and we were released mid January. Our journey was not over he would have open heart surgery to repair his holes in his heart and would need to get bigger for this.  We were able to have him once again home with us, worry and watch him grow. Savoring every second with him. Our story does not end here....it still continues 3 yrs later. you can view more about his journey at shanesheartofgold.blogspot.com It covers the first year of his life and I continue working on the rest. :) . Our journey will hopefully never end with Shane until I'm old and die. Our hurdles will and have been many but we continue and fight for a great life for Shane.