Background

In April, Tony and I found out that we are having a baby girl! We decided to name her Brynn Elizabeth Watts, which means "strong woman of God". We found out a few days after the initial sonogram that I have a two vessel cord (most umbilical cords have two veins and one artery, I have one artery and one vein). By itself this doesn't necessarily mean anything but it can be an indicator of some birth defects and classifies the pregnancy as high risk. We were told to come back for a more detailed scan.

It was at this second scan that the doctor told us that in addition to the two vessel cord Brynn has a severe heart defect: the right side of her heart is significantly smaller than the left. The combination of these two anomalies made the doctor suspect that she had a chromosomal abnormality. They performed an amnio right there. Tony and I went home to wait for 72 hours for the results. The first panel cam back normal, followed a week later by the entire panel! We were overjoyed and began to focus on what we needed to do to fix Brynn's heart.

Four weeks ago we went to Lucile Packard Childrens's Hospital for a fetal echo. The echo confirmed the diagnosis of a Hypoplastic Right Heart, which you can read more about here: http://congenital-heart-defects.co.uk/hypoplasticrightheartsyndrome.aspx.

We began at that point to research and prepare for a delivery at Lucille Packard followed by open heart surgery. We had to switch OB's since our original doctor does not have privileges to deliver at Stanford. Since then we have met our new OB and she is very nice. Everything else in the pregnancy is going normally.

We decided to create this blog so our friends and family can follow Brynn's progress and learn more about congenital heart defects. We know we have been given a very special gift in Brynn and we believe that her story can provide hope and strengthen faith.