After the diagnois

There are many names for 'Tet' spells...Cyanotic Spell being one. This is when the blood becomes suddenly low in oxygen, thus turning the baby blue at the lips, fingertips and toes.  A baby with Tetralogy of Fallot (uncorrected) will also have clubbed fingernails as a symptom. I had both.

When my parents took me in for a check-up around 10 months old, the doctor sat watching quietly, intently as I suddenly began to scream, my mom quickly lifted me to her shoulder in efforts to console.

"Does she do this often?" He asked.

"Yes. She gets really upset and starts screaming out of nowhere." The dim-lit home my parents lived in made it difficult to see that during these Cyanotic Spells, I was in fact turning blue.

Immediately the doctor picked up his phone, "We have an emergency. Please prep a room."

At that point I was admitted to the hospital, in which the first of many surgeries would soon follow. The hole in the wall (otherwise known as Ventricular Septal Defect) between the ventricles needed desperate correction.

The three following surgeries would nearly take my life.


Via the CDC's website regarding CHD's
Tetralogy of Fallot is made up of the following four defects of the heart and its blood vessels:

1. A hole in the wall between the two lower chambers―or ventricles―of the heart. This condition also is called a ventricular septal defect.
2. A narrowing of the pulmonary valve and main pulmonary artery. This condition also is called pulmonary stenosis.
3. The aortic valves, which opens to the aorta, is enlarged and seems to open from both ventricles, rather than from the left ventricle only, as in a normal heart. In this defect, the aortic valve sits directly on top of the ventricular septal defect.
4. The muscular wall of the lower right chamber of the heart (right ventricle) is thicker than normal. This also is called ventricular hypertrophy.