Aortic Atresia

Since I'm not good at explaining things I'm going to cheat and copy what my wife put on Hayden's care page and then I'll try to explain things.

Jackie's summary:

"The PDA remains open but we now know that is a good thing.(normally the PDA closes after the baby is born so blood can go to her lungs.) It is critical that the PDA remain open until surgery so she is on meds to keep it open. She has Aortic Atresia which to the best of my knowledge means that the trunk of her aorta is too narrow and the valve at the bottom is closed. She also has a "hole" called a Ventricular septal defect (VSD) in addition to the PDA. Her heart is using those two "holes" instead of the aorta like a normal heart would."

Now I'm going to try explaining it. Below is a couple pictures of what she has going on with her heart. Hopefully this makes sense.

(mayoclinic.com)

This is a normal heart with PDA opened because baby doesn't need it closed until birth.

For some reason Hayden's PDA is still open and is the main source for her blood flow. The blue blood is the blood that goes to the lungs and the red is blood with oxygen that goes to the rest of her body. Right now for Hayden everything is mixing and making a mess of things. But with the power of machines they can make everything somewhat normal for her until she gets this fixed.

This is the picture of the VSD. This is the other hole in the heart. This is whats causing the mixing of red and blue blood. Which is OK for now. Machines are somehow making her heart move the right blood to the right places. So now you see the PDA and the VSD which would of been an easy fix if this was the only two problems. Unfortunately we have another problem that is a big one. I really can't find a good picture for this but hopefully this makes sense. If you look at her aorta valve its red and big. Well Hayden's aorta is big at the top of her heart but gets smaller as you go down the heart and is blocked at the end. So no red blood can go through. SO! (here we go) what they want to do is keep the VSD open but put a patch in the right ventricle area so the blue blood can't mix with the red. Now the red is going through the VSD hole to the pulmonary artery(see first picture) and the blue bood is trapped by the patch. Now they'll put another patch right before the T crossing so the red blood won't go to the lungs. Instead they will open the pulmonary artery and hook it up to the aorta valve. So really the bottom part of the pulmonary artery will turn into the aorta.(I'm guessing your lost now). With the extra parts from the pulmonary artery they can build the rest of the aorta up to the size it should be. So now the red is where it's suppose to be, now the blue. In the right ventricle(see pic 2) they will insert a tube that will reach from the right ventricle to the, what I would call the T section of the pulmonary artery so the blue blood has a way to get to the lungs. Now everything is flowing the way it should be. I make it sound so easy. But its going to be a long procedure and one that has been done before with success. Now the only thing is that we'll have to come in every few years to replace that tube as she grows. Once her heart reaches its biggest size she would be done. We can handle that.

This is the picture that her doctor made for us. This will show what her heart will look like when its done. Maybe this will make more sense. If you look closely you can see dotted lines for the patches and some long dotted lines for the tube that goes from the bottom of the heart to the top.