Slightly enlarged heart…help!

[ChocGems]

Hi everyone

My baby is 4 weeks old and we got back from A&E yesterday with a diagnosis of bronchiolitis and a slight heart murmur after her breathing sounding snuffly and her cry just not sounding right. Had to stay for hours whilst DD had an ECG, X-Ray, bloods taken and blood pressure checks. All fine enough to let us go home…however, the doc said that the X-Ray showed DD as appearing to have a slightly enlarged heart which straight away made mine break but she said they couldn’t confirm if it was due to something doc called “word beginning with T and ending in S (sounded like tedious)” or if it was an enlarged heart.

I am struggling with the fact that they mention something like a possible enlarged heart but then say she is well enough to come home, we were told she would also need a heart echo scan for the murmur so should hopefully be getting the appointment letter for that, but I can’t stop worrying about her. She’s my first baby and the birth was pretty traumatic…but that’s for another time.

Any advice or similar / calming stories would be appreciated, thank you in advance x

Sorry I don’t have any advice, but didn’t want to read and run.

Sending positive thoughts and hope you and little one will be okay.

This must be scary but I'm sure the doctors wouldn't have sent you home if they were worried. I know several people who only discovered they had heart murmurs in their seventies. They were told they'd probably had them since birth with no issues.

Hopefully the follow-up tests will be reassuring but, if not, cardiologists can do amazing things and your baby will be in the best hands. Good luck.

Very hard to judge heart size on xray, especially in babies. One reason is that the thymus gland is large in babies, so can show up as a shadow reaching down from the top of the chest and partly overlying the shadow from the heart. If it is the thymus, then that's normal. Sounds sensible to get an echo to make sure one way or the other, but the majority of heart murmurs in babies are just a normal noisy heart, and even where they do find a problem, the vast majority are of the "let's keep an eye and make sure it fixes itself as the heart grows variety" rather than anything more serious. Fingers crossed: the odds are heavily in favour of nothing to worry about.

I don’t know if this is at all helpful but I recently had an ultrasound of my heart and they discovered that one chamber of my heart was enlarged. I was called back for a ‘bubble scan’ where they do an ultrasound of your heart whilst injecting saline solution. with bubbles of air in it into your arm. They check if the bubbles pass from one chamber into another. The procedure is painless. They can tell immediately if the bubbles go through that there is a hole in your heart (atrial septal defect). Could this be what you heard? As it happens I didn’t have a hole in my heart and the doctor lightheartedly said my heart did not seem enlarged at all on the day of the second scan and maybe I’d drank too much water before the first scan. I wasn’t quite sure if he was joking. A hole in the heart often closes in babies early on by themselves. Others need surgery. I’ve no idea if this is what your doctor was referring to I’m afraid. I also have a heart murmur by the way, have had it since birth and has never caused me any issues whatsoever. Try not to worry. They wouldn’t have sent you home if it was anything really urgent or serious.

Thank you all for replying with your positive thoughts, advice and personal stories.
I really appreciate it, DD seems to be doing well and I will wait for the echo scan before starting to worry further.