Hi, My name is Melissa and I have a three year old daughter named Anna-Gray who was born without a septum between her two normally sized ventricles. We were unaware of her heart defect until she was 2 months old. We had an ultrasound when I was 18 weeks pregnant but it was not caught at that time.

When Anna-Gray was born after an easy delivery, I noticed that she did not seem as "fat" as my first baby. I am a Pediatric ICU nurse so the first thing I did was listen to her heart to see if she had a murmur, which she did not. Every week I would take her to my pediatrician because she was not gaining weight very well. At six weeks she had started to gain weight a lot better but I still felt something was not quite right. One night around 7:00 pm I just new something was wrong so I took her to my unit where I work and asked our pediatric cardiac nurse to listen to Anna-Gray's heart. Her pulmonary vascular resistance had changed by this time and she now had a murmur.

Within a week she had her first operation; a PA Band. The next year she had a Glenn Shunt and this past summer she had her Fontan. She was in the pediatric ICU where I work for all of her surgeries so it was very strange looking at my own child lying there on the ventilator surrounded by machinery. As a PICU nurse you always feel so sorry for the families of the children who come in to the unit and you always say "I could not imagine my child being in here. I don't know how the parents hold up so well." Well now I know and I definitely have a bond with the families of the children I take care of.

Anna- Gray is doing great and has no bad effects from her heart or her surgeries. She is on baby aspirin and Lisinopril once a day. At some point when she is 50 or 60 years old she will need a heart transplant or whatever they are doing by then. The way medicine is advancing, I am sure it will be something great!