Yesterday 12 of the cardiologists at Oakland Children's Hospital met in conference on Charlize's case to come up with a plan of care. They are hopeful that with the surgery they did on Sunday she will be stable enough to be able to grow to between 2 and 4 months of age (the older and stronger the better) before proceeding with the next major corrective surgery. If she can do ok that long, the procedure would be to put a conduit to reroute the blood to the correct part of the heart. In 10 to 20 years because of growth and aging of the conduit, this will need to be repeated. If she has problems with her saturations (oxygenation levels) before that, they will probably first do what is called a Blalock-Taussig shunt which is a temporary palliative procedure that will place a shunt that allows more mixing of the blood, that will allow her to wait until the 2 to 4 months to do the first procedure mentioned above.
For those of you who would like to look further at what this condition is and the explanation, here is a link from Johns Hopkins that explains with very good pictures. www.pted.org/?id=transpositiond1 The procedure Charlize will have is mentioned, the Rastelli. Unfortunately, she has other complicating conditions that make the Jatene arterial switch procedure impossible.
Thank you all for your prayers and support! We are taking one day at a time and trusting and clinging to God each step.
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