About Heart Children: A Practical Handbook for Parents

“This handbook is worthy of mention for it highlights the issues that parents of heart children, and the children themselves, encounter and have to deal with. From it one can gain a very good understanding of just how valuable the charity’s work is.”

The discovery that your child has a heart defect can be a very scary experience. It is at this time, following diagnosis, that parents experience feelings of shock, panic and stomach-churning anxiety. The alarming high-tech medical world into which the family is catapulted often causes further fright. Although doctors and nurses do their best to describe matters, heart conditions are often so complicated and the surgical procedures so technical, that parents, in the first shock of diagnosis, often go away with an incomplete or erroneous picture of what is to happen. Of course ignorance breeds fear as unanswered questions emerge. Parents have enough to cope with at this time without taking on needless anxiety. Many other questions arise as your child goes through the process of hospitalisation, tests and surgery, so the second aim of the book is to provide a little comfort here, in giving some gentle explanations and sharing experiences. Finally, the advancing techniques of paediatric cardiology have enabled many children to survive who would not have done so even 30 years ago. So now, many parents are encountering for the first time the joyful problems of dealing with schooling, physical ability, suitable careers, holidays (flying and travel abroad), driving, insurance, genetic counselling, contraception, marriage, mortgages and a thousand and one situations which are hardly noticed by ‘ordinary families’. These produce questions for the family of a child with a heart problem and many of these topics are addressed in these pages.

The 5^th edition of Heart Children is now available to purchase at £14 per copy. A copy is made available to each associate member joining Heartline Families.

Please do let your hospital or GP know about the book as they may wish to purchase some to provide for other heart patient children.