Aurora was born on AUgust 5th, 2004. The pregnancy was pretty normal all the way up utnil about 26 weeks. We went in to get an ultrasound to find out the sex, and the lady doing the ultrasound didn't even end up looking until about an hour and half inot the ultrasound. This isn't normal, usually they last half hour at most. well then she pulled three or four doctors in to look, and after all of this was done, these doctors we'd never met took me and aurora's mom into another oom and asked us to sit down. They told us Aurora has a condition called Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. The left side of her heart did not form properly, and she would be born with half a heart. Well at this point they asked us what we wanted to do, gave us the options. Abort, have her and simply watch her die while they try to find a transplant for her, or try a three stage surgery that should give her heart about 30 years. Well of course we chose option 3. We finished the pregancy, (it was very high risk and we were at the doctors 3 times a week) and had AJ in 2004.
Well i'm not gonna go into too much how it felt seeing my firstborn come into the world, cause any parent already knows, and if you're not a parent.. you wot know till it happens. Anyways. right after they helped her into this world,they put aurora on a portable incubator and rushed her off to the Newborn Intensive Care Unit. I followed her. As a matter of fact, there's no way anyone could have stopped me. After two hours of watching them poke and prod at her, doing an echo cardiogram on her heart, they finally let me hold her. That was the greatest thing in the entire world. i get all teary just thinking aboutthe first time i held her. I fell in love instantly. Those of you who don't believe in love t first sight definitely don't have kids.. Anyways, Aurora was in the NICU for a month, and they let us take her home before her first surgery. After a week at home, we took her back to the hospital and she went through her first Open Heart Surgery. It took 8 hours, which was worse than an eternity in the worst imaginable place you can think of. I hated it, but i knew that she needed it to survive. She was not like other babies. She was not pink and pretty, she was beautiful of course, but she was blue. her skin looked like a smurfs. you can still see some blue tint if you know to look for it. but that's outta order. She came through that first surgery okay, but spent a month in a medication induced coma, and another month recovering in the hospital. Well we took her home after that.. and were very happy to do so. She is immuno suppresed, so there's all kinds of instructions we had to follow. No contact with other people, specially not kids, no leaving the house, no places where there are a lot of people, and she requires 24/7 supervision (even now) she could go from being perfectly healthy one second, to blue and dieing the next. It's pretty damn nerve wracking.
Well about a year after her first surgery they took her back into the hospital for her second surgery. All of these are working up to bypassing that left side of her heart, so that her heart doens't have to work twice as hard to do what our normal hearts do. This should make it so her heart can work and not wear out till about 30 years old!. She was in the hopspitla for... 5 days!!!! She's the strongest girl ever! 5 days to recover from open heart surgery.. i was just blown away. well march of 2006, i left her mom, and after a couple months, CPS called and told me to come get my daughter from her mom (the cops forced me to give my daughter to her, i tried to take her when i left, and the cops wouldn't let me keep her, even though i filed domestic abuse charges) anyways. i've had her pretty much full time since then. it's been about nine months. So the next step is in february there is a hearing to change custody to me fully. and the judge has alredy said she's going to award me custody. After that we've got an appt atthe cardiologist on march 7th. They said that they are going to schedule the Catheterization then, and the surgery will have to happen within a month of that. So april or may aurora will be having her last heart Surgery.. Called the Fontan procedure if you wanna look it up on the net. IT's the worst of the three and has an avg recovery time of 2 to 3 months. So that's what we got to look forward to in the coming months. and i'm just hoping that the custody shit and all the other crap is dealt with by then. ANwyas. that's it for AJ''sblog.. she's doing just great right now by the way. gainin weight real well, active and happy like any normal kid. the Dr.s are impressed with how well she's doing!... So there's AJ at a glance.. or a short read. lol.
