Our Personal turmoil on 9/11

It has been a long time since we last posted onto this blog.

And the void has been very turbulent and disturbing for us as well.
9/11 has cast a dark shadow in our otherwise peaceful and cool going lives.And both me and Lalitha are enduring this mierable time with the hope that it too shall pass.And it is with the same hope that things will get back to normal that we intend to document all the happenings since our last post on 1 sept.And since there is sizeable material to write on, we will soon end up filling pages and pages.

First the sad story.

Baby Ananya has been diagnosed with an enlarged heart.

And that has been shattering news to us.

Let me re-live the moments.

It all happened on an otherwise normal day - 9/11. Five in the evening and Ananya falls off the cot onto the carpet. She scaled through the protective pillow barriers to land on the floor in an ackward sandwich fashion. Lalitha was in another room trying to dispose Ananya's nappies.

When lalitha heard her agonising cry, she rushes to find Ananya on her back, her head still resting on the wall of the cot and tears in her eyes.Her loud wails and gasps for breath could even melt the hardest hearts.I was in the office at that time. Lalitha called me up and after expaling the situation, we decided to take her to the children's emergency.

It took me 45 minutest to reach home.By that time, the pain had subsided and things looked more in control. Ananya managed to give me her usual 'Good evening daddy' expression.Still, to err on the side of caution, we decided to take her to hospital to rule out any internal injuries.The long wait in the hospital, waiting to be seen by the medical staff, gave us an insight into the physical damages which young children can cause onto themselves oblivious to dangers around them.
After an hour and half of waiting, we were seen by a nurse, who noted the case sheet and directed us to a pediatrician.Another hour later, we went to the pediatrician's room.She again heard the story from us and pressed ananya's tummy hard to see if there are any internal damages. She then took a kind of an instrument and inserted it in her ear and removed it for a brief moment. ( we later learned that this instrument measures the electrical activity of the brain and thereby any damage to the brain)
Then, she took the steth and observed ananya's chest and heart and her back.Her expression slowly changed. She immediately went and fetched another senior doctor who came over and repeated all the examination.
Anxiety nearly killed us.
We knew something was not okay, though we were unsure.

Then the doctor broke the news.
Ananya has a murmer in her heart and an enlarged heart.

Murmers, we know are very common in infants ( upto 50% infants have murmers and they are mostly innocent ( systolic murmers)But what troubled both the doctors and us was the enlarged heart part.We were then advised my the doc to get an instant ECG and chest x-ray for Ananya.Another excruciating wait.Back home in India, they apply some sort of gel and clip the electrical contacts directly on the body for ECG tests. But here, the nurse put some stickers with a dangling end and clipped the contacts to these dangling parts.We thought this was a better approach. But what we did not realise was that peeling off the stickers from her chest would cause her a lot of pain. The power of the glue is too strong for our comfort.

We then went to the xray chamber to get her xray done. She was made to sleep on the cold xray film. I wore a 20 KG lead suit and stood holding her still.After the xray, our next ordeal of waiting for the results.we were called back in at 11PM and were finally confirmed that the heart was indeed enlarged.

A disastrous way to end a rather nice day

Will write more on this in my next posts.