These past few days have been crazy again! And it was good to be home for a bit, but I won’t lie, being home is also stressful. Stressful in the way that when I’m there I just want to stay, but then I’m torn because I miss Ava. And Erik was started to say how he just wanted to stay home and was starting to say it a lot, and so yesterday Jason and I decided since home is just not our reality right now, it would be just best to head back to Toronto. We did leave rather late last night, but usually when you leave late at night there isn’t any traffic so it works in your favour. But not last night! We hit construction around 11:30 pm on the 401, so had to take a detour, just to hit downtown Toronto at 12:30 am. And it seriously could have been 12:30 pm, it was that busy. We weren’t sure if a show or a game had just gotten out before we arrived, but there were people and cars everywhere which definitely slowed us down. We finally got back to the Ronald MacDonald House around 1:00 am… fun.
This morning I was so tired I called the hospital at 8:00 am to say that I would be shortly and to check on Ava, and was reassured that Ava was fine. But then around 9:30 am I received a phone call from Ava’s nurse to say that Ava’s heart rate was up, and with that her temp was coming up and she spiked a fever of 39 degrees and I should come in. Oh Ava.
And to make matters worse, when I got to the hospital, I found that they decided that Ava needed to be watched more, so they moved her out of her private room and into a true “step-down” room where there are 4 children and two nurses who never leave the room. This was upsetting because if we aren’t in our own room our kids can’t come and visit Ava, and if Ava can’t wait for a heart, this might be all the time we have with her, and it would be very hard if we couldn’t all be together.
I called Jason and asked him and the kids to pray for Ava, and to pray that we would get moved back to our own room… and not 10 minutes later we got the news that they did decide that it would be best for us to be back in our room, praise God! We were going to have to wait since they had moved someone else into there, but they would be out later in the day and then we could move back. It was so cool that God answered the kids prayers and they were pretty pumped about it. William thought it would be cool if everything he prayed for got a ‘yes’ answer so quickly… which made me really glad that God has a sovereign will. 
So the end the day saw Ava back in her own room. The poor girl slept most of the day today, she clearly wasn’t feeling that good, and because of the fever they took more blood cultures from her… this probably makes 100 blood tests in the past weeks. They just can’t find any infection. We did have that one positive culture the other day, but it may have been a one-off because nothing else has ever been found. She seems to be showing signs of infection, but I’m starting to have my own theory. I’m wondering if Ava is in some kind of pain, which causes her heart-rate to go up, and because of her heart-failure, the increased heart rate actually causes her temperature to rise. This would be opposite to the premise that usually applies, that an increased heart-rate is caused by a fever.
Who knows, I’m certainly no doctor, but when I called tonight at 9:00 pm to see how Ava was, her heart rate was back up into the 170′s, so I asked the nurse to give her some morphine. I called an hour later and her heart rate was back down to 140. So maybe Ava is in pain. I would like to try to keep her pain free for a day or two to see if we can keep her heart rate down, and just maybe, that will keep the fevers at bay.
If I’m wrong, I would just pray that some source of infection would be found in our poor little Birdy. She’s been poked so many times that she’s not going to have any blood left and like I said before they just can’t find any infection that would explain her fevers.
But whatever happens, I’m so grateful that our family is back together, and so thankfully that God answers prayers!
