Fact: 50% of people with Down syndrome are born with a congenital heart defect.
Penelope today, at 30 months, has this bump in the middle of her chest from the healing of her sternum. You can see the faint circle shaped scars from her chest tubes.
A close up of Penelope's chest scar. You can really see the scar from the left plural chest tube. She also had a chest tube in the middle after her 2nd surgery (for the total repair). There is that bump again.
Here is Penelope several weeks after her 2nd surgery, the incision is still healing.
This was probably the first bath Penny got when she came home, so about 15 days after her first surgery. She still had the steri-strips over her inscision. You can see the dark maroon circles a few inches under her nipples. These are the wounds from the chest tubes. The week after this, the steri-strips were removed at the cardio office and then a few days after that an infection grew in the inscision wound. I think that added to the appearance of her scar.
Yay! A clean slate. A picture of her chest before she was brought under the knife. Penelope does not have her own pulmonary artery so she will need several surgiers throughout her life. I don't worry too much about her scar since there will be future inscisions to contend with. I hope that Penelope will grow to think of them as her battle scars.
1 comment:
Jaxsons bump on his chest has gone down as he's gotten longer I've noticed. But its definitely a tale of what they've been through. you can still see where every chest tube and every line was.
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