Ryan's Heart

“First,” he said, “I want to show you how a normal heart works.”

As we sat in the hospital nursery, the pediatric cardiologist placed a diagram in front of us on the table. Normal heart? That meant Ryan’s was…not normal.

Two days before, after a wonderful pregnancy and an unmedicated delivery that left me feeling like a superhero, our son arrived on this earth. And here we were, a few hours from the time we thought we were going to be discharged, straining to focus on this biology lesson, complete with illustrations.

“This is what your son’s heart looks like,” the doctor said, presenting another diagram, which he laid over the one of a normal heart. My husband clutched our swaddled Ryan to his chest while I began gulping for air, trying to hold back the sobs in my throat so I could attempt to absorb what was being told to us. Our precious baby boy, not even forty-eight hours old, had a heart defect.

When you’re pregnant, you hear about—and get tested for—all sorts of illnesses and conditions: Down Syndrome, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida. Depending on your state of mind and the amount of research you allow yourself to do, you either develop an intense fear of any “abnormal” result, or you shrug it off and tell yourself, “God knows what He is doing.” And then this beautiful little human emerges from your body. And then two days later, your heart stops because there is something wrong with your son’s.

During the whirlwind that was Ryan’s first few days of life, we were shocked to learn that heart defects are the most common birth defect, and approximately 35,000 infants with heart defects are born each year. According to the American Heart Association, nearly twice as many children die from congenital heart defects in the United States each year as die from all forms of childhood cancers combined. Surgery alone costs more than $2.2 billion dollars annually, and more than 91,000 life years are lost each year due to congenital heart defects, the AHA Web site states.