Zach's heart

I've been wanting to share pictures here..but I am having a hard time getting to them. So instead, I will do this.

In honor of this


I'll tell you about Z's heart.

This is a normal heart..




And this is how Z's was at birth.



He also had one of these



It's really hard to tell on these pictures, but his pulmonary veins were connected to his superior vena cava instead of to his heart. The superior vena cava is the vein that his pacemaker leads are now through. Doing the surgery on that vein, is what caused it to be narrow and what caused all the problems during this last surgery.

You can see that the atrial septal defect repair would be in the right atrium. Unfortunately, this is where the sinus node is as well. The sinus node is what tells your heart to beat. The repair of the ASD is what caused the damage to the sinus node in the first place. And all the scarring from the repair is what caused it to be so hard to place the leads in the atrium.

There, now you know a bit more about Zachy's miraculous heart.