Waiting For A Name

Common Heart Defects

One of the shows my wife and I like to watch together is Game of Thrones.  Without giving any spoilers away to anyone who has not seen the show, it does a great job of making you fall in love with a noble family known as the Starks, only then to have lots and lots of bad stuff happen to them.  The show then begins to focus on some of the younger members of the family, one of which is the youngest daughter, Arya Stark.  One of the things Arya must do in the show is, before she is able to sleep at night, she must say the names of all the people she wants dead in her search for vengeance her family.  She does this in the form of a prayer.  Saying the names helps her remember who has wronged her family, and it also gives her a sense of control over the vengeance that she seeks.

Probably the hardest part of where we are at in the process with Brent is knowing there is a problem, but not having a name for it.  Without a name, we don't know what to call it, what to tell people when they ask about it, how to research it, how to discover what his options will be, his prognosis, what his life might be like, etc.  There are many types of heart defects, and while his sounds rare and complex based on what we know so far, we don't yet have a name for it - an official diagnosis.  We hope that Monday's visit to the cardiologist will provide us that. 

I am hopeful since many of the heart defects I've read about have a "and this is how we fix it" section, although many require lifelong care.  At this point, surgery or miraculous healing are really the only options I want to think about.

And I realize that once I have a name, it won't give me any more control over the situation than I have now.  Sure I will spend time researching it, reading about others who have gone through the same thing, preparing myself for a variety of potential outcomes.  But in the end, this is something that I cannot fix and I cannot control.

So before I go to sleep at night, I will say the names of the blessings I've been given, and then I can sleep...  Grace, Brandon, Brooke, Bryce, and Brent. 

David