Camden's VSD update

I took Camden to his annual cardiologist appointment last Friday to have his heart looked at again. The bad news is, the hole is still there. The good news is, it has maintained its small size, so they will not have to treat it. They will just continue to monitor him annually to make sure that it isn't getting bigger, and hopefully will one day close on its own. Camden did really great for the EKG part of the exam. He thought it was pretty cool when they put the stickers all over his chest and then plugged in all of the little electrode things. The part that he did not do well with was the echocardiogram. He screamed and screamed and screamed. If you didn't know any better, you would think that we had him bound and gagged in a torture chamber. Well, maybe to him that's what it was. I did sort of have him bound so that he would hold still, and I am sure to a small child that the exam room probably looked like a torture chamber. Not to mention that it was all in the same week of being looked at in the back of an ambulance at the car accident, and then checked out again by his doctor the next day. I think the kid is traumatized for life when it comes to medical care.

His cardiologist is very patient and very good. She told us that they no longer recommend having people with VSD take antibiotics prior to dental treatments and surgeries. Apparently that's been new since last May. I'm relieved about that, as long as it is really true. I would hate to put him at risk of a heart infection just to satisfy doctors fears of over using antibiotics. But at the same time, I don't want to overuse the antibiotics either and have him resistant to them. I guess it's a catch 22. Oh well, I suppose the doctors know best.