One of the thoughts that may have cast horror upon your mind is the possibility of there being something wrong with your child. More often than not, this common parental concern is a manifestation of one's natural urge to ensure the viability of the new life which is destined to carry one's genes unto successive generations. Anxiety within this context is therefore advantageous from an evolutionary perspective, because it helps to maintain the survival of our species.
If only it were that simple.
Let's face it. We LOVE our kids. Babies are miracles in progress, and we become God's captive audience, watching in awe as our infants flourish seamlessly into capable adults. As parents, we are sentenced (privileged) to worry about our children for the rest of our lives. Will they be content? Healthy? Fulfilled? In a very real sense, our happiness depends entirely upon their physical and emotional well-being. The strength of this bond reaches far beyond the call of the wild: it is instinctive, but it is not constrained by the limits of sheer physicality. We are emotionally and spiritually linked to our children.
As such, it is easy to understand the depth of a parent's concern for his child. The diagnosis of a dreadful disease is every mother's (or father's) worst nightmare. In a brave new world where even innocuous eye infections become the focus of intense scrutiny, what does one make of congenital heart disease?
The unfortunate reality is that one out of every hundred babies is born with some form of congenital heart deficiency. CHDs account for the greatest number of birth defects in the world. The good news is that most can be remedied or corrected outright if they are treated promptly. Sadly, many cardiac defects are not identified until several weeks following the birth of an affected child. This is partly due to the increasing trend across North-America to release mothers and babies from the hospital very quickly following a normal delivery. This may cause health practitioners to overlook heart defects that have not been identified in-utero, because the critical change in blood pressure that occurs in the first few days of life has yet to take place. Hence, the characteristic murmur presented by a heart defect may only be detected upon the baby's first routine visit to the paediatrician's office. To complicate matters, many babies with CHD are asymptomatic until the aforementioned critical pressures change, appearing healthy and robust until the sudden onset of deterioration. When you add this to the fact many symptoms inherent to heart failure mimic those of other ailments, the potential for disaster is readily apparent.
