So Haven’s goals for this week have been to wean off the ventilator support and shed unnecessary fluid in her tissues.  (You may have noticed from her most recent pics that she is a bit on the puffy side again).  She has been doing a decent job with both of those…until mid-day today.  We noticed that though she was sleeping like a rock, her heart rate was a little high and unchanging.  As an experiment, we decided to try to wake her up a bit in hopes that her heart rate would increase.  No such luck.  After we had her moving around and worked up, her heart rate remained unchanged.  Well, we’ve all seen this before…several times. 

We paged the docs, and they diagnosed her as being in Atrial Flutter for the fourth time.  Well, we’re all experts with this problem by now, so we wheeled in the cart and successfully cardioverted (zapped) her (for the fourth time).  You may be thinking what we were thinking, “How often is this going to keep happening?  WHY does it keep happening?”  Well, neither of those questions are easily answered for obvious reasons:  a specific cause for her Atrial Flutter is unknown, therefore it’s hard to say if it will happen again.  Given her track record, I think we are almost expecting it to come back.  The cardiologists are in the process of checking some levels in her blood.  They plan on giving her more arrhythmia-preventing medications, but they need to know how her blood is handling the ones she’s currently on.  You can’t just load a person up with these types of medications because it could then actually trigger more arrhythmias. 

So, those results should be back sometime next week, then they will be able to give her more medications as they deem appropriate.  In the meantime, we’ll just hope Haven doesn’t settle into Atrial Flutter again.  Though the current treatment seems to work just fine, we’re not too sure how often we really want to send electricty bolting through our daughter.  It’s not uncommon to experience these types of things after open-heart surgeries.  Interestingly enough, she has a few more open-heart surgeries to go through.  Those procedures might inadvertantly fix whatever might be causing her heart to act up now. 

Thanks to Uncle Justin for posting the new pictures.  We hope you all enjoyed them.  Also, thank you so much for your continued encouragement.  The Bible tells us that this life is as fleeting as the wind (Psalm 78:39), and that we are to set our affections on things above, not on things of this earth (Colossians 3:2).  That’s hard for us humans to do because we are selfish and think so much of our lives now.  We forget that life on earth is just a drop in the bucket and doesn’t even compare to the lives we will have in Heaven with Jesus Christ eternally (Romans 8:18).  Praise God for his gift of ever-lasting life through only our faith in His Son, Jesus Christ!