No better news

Sometimes, good news comes when you need it most.

The breast-beatings, lamentations and general malaise lasted longer than we expected after last week's ear-tube tumult. We both wish it went better and beat ourselves up for pinning so much on what we should have known was a long-shot.

And it's been one of those weeks with Hope. My worry about disrupting the status quo with surgery proved prescient. The huge smiles, full-body giggles and "Oooh Daddy! You are so Funny" chortles are mostly gone. In their place are much fussiness, tears and apathy about Mom and Dad.

So, as usual, we felt physically ill sitting in the waiting room today for Hope's cardiology appointment. Heart defects are the main reason some CdLS kids don't reach adolescence.

It was a three-month follow-up to check on Hope's left ventricle, the main pumping chamber of the four that comprise the heart. It's a bit big. That's not good.

The fear is that generally chambers are big for a reason: Something is making it work too hard. We worried it is a manageable, but incurable, condition known as cardiomyopathy, which is quite bad.

It turns out that, like a lot with Hope, she may just be doing her own thing.

Her ventricle is a bit bigger than it was three months ago, but proportionately so to the rest of her heart. Blood is flowing fine. Her numbers are great. The heart is beating up a storm. Everything is doing what it should.

"I couldn't deliver any better news today," Hope's cardiologist told us. "If we haven't been tracking her since birth, we probably wouldn't have ever known there was an issue."

We'll see the cardiologist again in six months. After that, maybe once a year or maybe never.

Wow.

Now is normally the time I would pontificate: Let this be a lesson in the vagaries of life, I might say, or Sometimes, your worst fears become pussycats when you stare them in the eye. But I've learned the hard way not to tempt fate by getting too ahead of myself.

So I leave it at wow.

Wow.