Sophia is four years old today. I cannot believe how fast the time has gone and how much has happened. I don't know if anyone is still reading this blog but I wanted to update it.
Today Sophia went to preschool where she made a card for mommy and wrote her own name on it. She played catch with daddy. Pretended to be "mommies with babies in their tummies" with other little girls at school. She first helped her brother (nick-named Mino) find his toy ball then took it from him (ah, four year olds). She also hugged Mino (he is 2 years old) and helped him up when he fell. She is a good big sister and an amazing little girl.
I wish I could say that the last three years since our last post went smoothly. I kept meaning to post updates but somehow couldn't. So, I write this now even though this is old news that anyone reading this blog would already have heard about but I write this more for myself.
On March 12th, 2009 we were on an evening Alaska airlines flight to San Diego. Sophia collapsed. She stopped breathing, she stopped everything. It was indescribably awful. There was a nurse and a couple other medical personnel who happened to be on the flight and they did CPR till we landed in SD (we were 26,000 feet up when this started). There was an ambulance waiting on the tarmac and the medic came on board, grabbed Sophia and ran off the plane. We followed. I distinctly remember seeing Christopher running after them with our then 10 week old son in his arms whose big blue eyes were wide and staring at me as if asking what was wrong and if it would be ok. This episode started the scariest four days of our lives. A heart CT showed that she had coronary stenosis and that same coronary had essentially gotten wedged between her aorta and her pulmonary artery pinching it off (hence the heart attacks). We finally had Sophia medically transported back to Stanford. She had gone into cardiac arrest three times already in SD. Transporting her was a huge risk but Christopher and I somehow knew it is what she needed. She made the transport. When we arrived at the CV-ICU in Stanford we saw lots of people in the room including our favorite nurse Rosalina (she took care of Sophia her first couple nights after her first surgery). Christopher and I were exstatic....here it was at 10pm on a Saturday night and there were like a hundred people on call to save our Sophia. They had her set up in no time, took her to the cath lab where she went into cardiac arrest again and was put on ECMO (extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation - it is similar to a heart lunch machine and immediately taken into surgery (it was about 3am Sunday morning). Dr. Redy conducted her surgery. It was again full open heart surgery with bypass and they left her chest open but the good news was that it went well and she was able to come out of surgery off ECMO. It was surreal to be back at the hospital going through all this again. Not to mention now also having a second little baby to care for.
My family was there as they always are (how I love them for that). My mom watched Mino during the day so I could stay with Sophia and Christopher once again took the night shift with her. The recovery was in many ways emotionally more difficult than the first time....she was now two and could talk and was so scared. It was also hard to see her going from running like a crazy girl all over that airport to not even being able to walk at first.
Despite all of this and what during those initial four days seemed against the odds, Sophia is with us and has been doing great. She has displayed no lingering neurological affects and her heart muscle and function are back to normal. If you met her you would never guess her medical history. Sophia has tons of energy, thinks everything is "silly" and chatters non-stop. She is simply and wonderfully Sophia and for that we are eternally grateful.
