Hunter Chase

Hunter was born March 21, 2004. He seemed perfectly healthy, but in June we noticed that he would break out in a cold sweat, look very dazed, and when you were holding him you could feel his heart racing. It stopped after about 5 minutes so we thought nothing of it. It did this a few more times so we took him to our pediatrician and she had no idea what was going on so she ordered an EKG; when she got the results back she noticed his left ventricle was a little enlarged so she referred us to a cardiologist, that we were to go see on that Monday.

Well, on Thursday, the episode started again and just got faster and faster. We decided to take him to Texas Children's in Houston. We got there about 11:00 p.m. and while checking in the nurse listened with her stethoscope and told the other nurse standing there to take us back immediately. We went into a room and hooked Hunter up to a machine and it showed his heart racing at 250 beats per minute, the nurse said that couldn't be right so we went to another room, and the other machine was even higher, he went and got his supervisor, who was very calm and said to finish with the readings first.

When they finished the second nurse grabbed Hunter's diaper bag and took off running, bursting through the doors of the ER and said we needed a room STAT. Within 2 minutes there were 3 nurses 5 doctors and 2 cardiologists down there working on him, getting an IV started, and had him hooked up to an EKG. They finally got his heart back to normal and we were told that he had Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, and wanted to admit him to the hospital to do more tests. So we were put in a room about 3:00 a.m.

Around 9:00 they came and got us for an echocardiogram. We didn't hear anything about the results all day so we asked a nurse and she said she would check. An intern doctor came in and said that they did find something during the echo but she is not qualified enough to explain but would have the cardiologist come in first thing in the morning. Try sleeping after hearing that. Well the cardiologist came in and said that Hunter also had coarctation of the aorta, and would have to have surgery.

Hunter had the surgery at the end of August and has been doing very well. We went back to the cardiologist in February for a follow up echo to make sure the surgery was successful, and we were hit again with possible bad news. They said his left ventricle was thicker then than it was after his surgery which is not normal. They think he may have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or has the doctor calls it, idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis. We go back tomorrow for another echo to either confirm or deny it.

Hunter is a very happy baby that hardly ever cries. He laughs all the time especially at his big sister...