Thursday, November 29, 2012

#1a - Washington, DC - Part 1

My birthday.

No, that isn't a typo. My first visit outside of Maryland came just a few hours after I was born. That's what happens when your parents are told throughout the entire pregnancy that their baby is healthy and has a strong heart beat and when she's born, she's blue. I try not to think about what it must have been like for my parents during that time. My mom was obviously stuck at the hospital where I was born and my dad was caught between his wife and his new baby girl that had a complex heart defect and was being transported by ambulance to a different hospital.

Obviously everything turned out fine since I'm here today writing this blog. I spent the next month living in DC at Children's National Medical Center and then had to go back for appointments every few months after that until I was four or five. I thought the hospital was the only thing DC had to offer. I had no grasp on everything it had and still has to offer me.

I'm grateful that this post is happening at this time. It gives me an opportunity to bring together two very important parts of my life and allows me to open the door to write about things besides my travels. While I realize that I set this up to be a travel blog, there won't always be a post for me to write about my travels and writing about my life with Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) will fill those empty travel times. As I reflect on the name of my blog, 50some, it rings true with my CHD as well. The cardiologists predicted when I was a baby that I would live well into my fifties without needing any sort of additional medical intervention. I'm at a crossroads right now that is almost certainly going to end in a change of direction and a need for intervention.

Since this summer I've been making pretty frequent trips to the beautiful district. It moves me every single time I drive down there as I take Capitol Street and get to see the Capitol Building for a few brief moments. While driving into DC isn't my favorite thing to do, it's a necessity these days.

I don't want to overload the health information as it's a lot of medical terms and each new test my cardiologist has me do is revealing a new problem with my heart. The basics are that I was born with Transposition of the Great Arteries and had an arterial switch done at one week old. Up until this summer I was seeing a pediatric cardiologist and a scare with heart palpitations ushered in my transition to the Adult Congenital Heart Clinic at Children's National Medical Center and Washington Hospital Center. I now see a cardiologist who specializes in adults with CHD and he's been finding some not so up to snuff things going on with my heart. It isn't working like it should and right now he's trying to find out everything that isn't working correctly so that he can design a plan to make things work better than they are now. I will be having a procedure done sometime in the coming month that will gather some more information and possibly correct one of the issues that's been found.

So there's the story of my first visit to DC and a lot more about why I now go to DC on a fairly regular basis. I'm going to do another post about my first tourist visit. That was a lot more fun and not nearly as intense as my first visit.

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