2.14.2012

And Yet Another SVT Episode :o(

Miss K had a bad afternoon yesterday.  It started at about 1pm after her morning nap, she woke up smiling but it didn't last long.  She was fussy and hard to make happy until her afternoon nap, I thought she was just tired and would sleep her usual 3 hours to wake up happy for the evening but I was SO wrong :o(.  Miss K only slept 30 minutes and woke up screaming, I rocked her and bounced her and tried everything I could think of to get her back to sleep, she got her self really worked up, I checked her heart rate constantly throughout this spurt of crankiness and was happy to hear it beating at a good steady, slow pace of about 120 BPM like normal the whole time.  After almost an hour of rocking and bouncing she finally calmed down and fell into a very light sleep.  I spent the next hour keeping her big brother VERY quiet so as not to wake the screaming, cranky girl again.  When her Daddy got home she woke up immediately and wasn't happy about it, no matter how quiet my husband is the kids just know he's home and asleep or not they want to be with him.  Miss K spent the rest of the evening being crabby and fussy.  At bedtime I was trying to make her happy so she wouldn't keep her brother up, I noticed her heart seemed to be beating out of her chest under my hand so I grabbed the stethoscope for about the hundredth time yesterday and sure enough it was racing.  I am happy to say that it wasn't beating so fast we couldn't count it and I was able to keep count for a whole minute, I came up with about 192 BPM.  It was hard to know exactly what to do for her, we've never been through an episode like this before.  Miss K was fine, just fussy and acting like she didn't feel well and her heart wasn't in "true SVT" as her Cardiologist would say.  True SVT is a heart rate over 210 BPM.  So her Daddy and I just decided to ride it out and see what happened, we listened to her heart about every 2-3 minutes to make sure it didn't beat any faster.  At 10pm we were able to give her her Propanolol and then I could feed her for the night, while eating Miss K finally relaxed completely and soon after that her heart rate slowed to it's normal 120's and she fell asleep.  It was a stressful moment for us, we knew she was fine but the whole not knowing if she would stay below 200 BPM or if she was inevitably going to race above 200 BPM and pass out like her first episode of this year was nerve racking.  I'll be logging this episode in her little log book and hope and pray she doesn't have any more or worse episodes.  Any "true SVT" episodes that end up being scary will inevitably mean a medication adjustment, most likely upping her Amiodarone, which is something we DO NOT wish to do if we can avoid it.

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