Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Coping and support
By Mayo Clinic staffIt can be extremely frightening to learn that your child has potentially life-threatening heart defects. Although support groups aren't for everyone, talking to other parents — especially ones who've already gone through the surgery — can give you hope, encouragement and people to lean on. Ask your doctor if there are any support groups for parents of children with heart defects in your area.
Be sure to give yourself a break at times. Ask other family members or friends to help you take care of your child. When your child is in the hospital, see if you can schedule friends and family to visit with your child so that you can go home to take a shower or nap, or to spend some time with your other children.
To help coordinate your child's care, you may wish to prepare a brief note with your child's diagnosis, medications, surgeries and their dates, and your cardiologist's name and number. This note will provide necessary information to others who may care for your child and will help any new doctor understand your child's health history.
If you change health insurance plans, be sure your new plan will cover your child's care, as some plans may not allow coverage for pre-existing conditions or may require a waiting period.
- Tetralogy of Fallot. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/tof/tof_all.html. Accessed Nov. 7, 2009.
- Tetralogy of Fallot. American Heart Association. http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=11071. Accessed Nov. 7, 2009.
- Bailliard F, et al. Tetralogy of Fallot. Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases. 2009;4:2.
- Tetralogy of Fallot. The Merck Manuals: The Merck Manual for Healthcare Professionals. http://www.merck.com/mmpe/print/sec19/ch287/ch287g.html. Accessed Nov. 3, 2009.
- Tetralogy of Fallot. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/TetralogyOfFallot.htm. Accessed Nov. 11, 2009.
- Apitz C, et al. Tetralogy of Fallot. The Lancet. 2009;374:1462.
- ACC/AHA 2008 guidelines for the management of adults with congenital heart diseases. Washington D.C. and Dallas, Tex.: American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association. http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/reprint/CIRCULATIONAHA.108.190690v1. Accessed Nov. 7, 2009.
