Our house got very busy quickly with a 2 month old, a 14 month old, and a 25 month old. The following Monday my nephew was placed in daycare via my parents' kind offer to pay the bill. He was at our house evenings and weekends and that was honestly all I could handle. I felt like I was in some sort of dream or trance for those few weeks. It was as if every moment was busy and in the mean time my head and heart were spinning with emotion and fears about Brianna.
My nephew stayed with us for 5 weeks then returned home to his mom and his new baby sister.
In retrospect the busy household probably did me a world of good because in those first weeks after Brianna's diagnosis I didn't have the time to sit and research, to work up my fears, or to do anything else that would hinder my relationship with my daughter. She continued to nurse and now the weight gain (or lack there of) was easily explained by her major heart defect. That was another weight off my shoulders. Her sleep patterns were also explained by the heart defect since her body was working overtime as if she was running a marathon every day. Slowly the fear of the unknown became the driver for educating ourselves on what was to come.
At 5 months old we reached the time for Brianna's open heart surgery. We traveled 3 hours west to St. Petersburg and met the surgeon and cardiology team, then spent the next day in pre-op. Day 3 was the big day and she went in for her 4 hour corrective surgery. Her AV Canal along with a large VSD and a ASD were closed up and she was back in her room on ROOM AIR (no ventilator)! She healed well but then caught a virus. She had a reaction to the antibiotic and we were glad to find out that it wasn't bacterial after all. It was 2 weeks (and MANY sleepless nights) later that we made the decision to put in a g-tube since she still wasn't gaining weight. I had been coming up at all hours of the night and in the end was spending the night with her (even though that wasn't *allowed*) to nurse her every hour again. We came home in 19 days and have had a HEALTHY, HAPPY, ALERT, AWARE, CURIOUS baby girl ever since!
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