hec0903

I’m so sorry to hear about your second pregnancy, I can’t imagine what an incredibly difficult decision that had to have been to make.

I’m also curious about the risk of subsequent critical CHDs. I had a healthy pregnancy with no indication of structural abnormalities, and it wasn’t until our son’s 4 month checkup that our ped heard a previously undetected heart murmur. He was then diagnosed with ToF, and underwent OHS at 5.5 mo. We are so grateful for his incredible cardiology team, and he is now 13 months old and thriving, but as we think more about expanding our family, the thought of having another baby with a complex CHD (or any CHD, for that matter!) feels very intimidating. We’re in the process of having a genetic panel done for our son to see if there are any genetic markers that could explain his condition, but the likeliest scenario is that it was random. We’ve heard the chance of having a baby with a CHD is about 1%, but that it goes up to 5% if you’ve previously had a child with CHD. Is this accurate? We were also shocked that our son’s wasn’t detected in utero—his VSD was quite significant. What are the odds of critical CHDs going undetected in utero? I guess my question boils down to: how scared should we be going forward? I know that’s probably not easily answered. Just curious what the current data is!