Happy Graduation!!

This is Evelyn and 2 of her Nurse Practitioners.

I am so grateful today for how well Evelyn is doing! Yesterday, we went to a CHIEF program graduation. CHIEF stands for Complex Congenital Heart Infant Evaluation and Follow-up program. It is the program Evelyn was in for a couple of months after she got out of the hospital. She graduated about a month ago and yesterday was a ceremony for all the kids who graduated this year. Out of the 40 babies who were supposed to be there, about 35 responded and only about 20 came. It was a sweet ceremony where they called each baby up by name and gave them a diploma. They even had tiny caps with tassels on them for the little ones to wear. Afterward, there was a professional photographer who took group and individual pictures. I'm sure somehow we'll get copies, but we don't have them right now.

The thing that made me most grateful was Dr. Pophal, Evelyn's cardiologist, gave some statistics for the kids in the CHIEF program. The smallest baby was 2 1/2 lbs, the earliest was 3 weeks early, most of the babies go home on feeding tubes with an average of 4 medications. Then he said that about 85% of the babies only have 1 pumping chamber in their hearts. Evelyn has 2. That makes her in the minority. It made me so happy to see how much we have been blessed with her. There were 4 babies who still had feeding tubes; one of whom was about 10 months old. I am amazed that Evelyn has done so well and progressed so quickly.