Sorry for the delayed follow up. As it turns out Lizzie slept a lot the morning of the appointment which made things a little easier on Steph. The echo went surprisingly well. Lizzie was definitely loopy from the sedative they gave her (to keep her calm and still so they can get accuracte pictures), but this was by far the easier appointment for me in terms of keeping her arms down. Both the dr. and the tech for the echo were very nice and kid-friendly. They're very good at their jobs.
Then we went downstairs to see Dr. Shaughnessy. Everything looks... the same! Not perfect, but everything is stable. The valve is still a little weak (it leaks a smidge), but it's just about the same as it has been, so that's good news. If we were staying in town, we wouldn't have to go back for another year!
Clarification: We found out at this appointment that Lizzie does NOT have an artificial valve... in the medical sense. Seems artificial in the medical sense means a foreign (read: man-made) substance. Since hers is not Goretex or titanium (or something similar), it's not technically artificial. What was added to her valve was a fixed biological tissue (I want to say pericardium, but I'm not 100% sure on that). It doesn't grow or expand or anything, it's just stable tissue (the Dr. didn't know if it came from Lizzie or from someone else, but her guess was that it was from someone else...) that was added to strengthen things.
More good news: When Lizzie's heart was first fixed up, the guesses were that she would need another surgery sometime before she's age 5 and then again before age 13. Dr. Shaughnessy said on Tuesday that Lizzie probably wouldn't need anything done on her heart until "sometime before she's 20". Woo hoo!
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