Cardiac Catheter Procedure Date

At every single appointment we have had with Riley's cardiologist Dr Justo without fail he would say "The plan is that we will let Riley have her fourth birthday and then after that we do her Cardiac Catheter Procedure and then we will do her surgery". Well Riley's birthday was this past Tuesday and guess what we got a call about on Thursday? We finally have a date for the Cardiac Catheter Procedure. It's going to be on Tuesday February 13th. For some weird reason I always had a feeling it would be mid-February. We happen to have one of our biggest weekends at Church around that date and I just somehow knew that out of all the dates it could possibly fall on; it was bound to be then.

The game plan is that we will need to be in Brisbane that Sunday so we can be there for pre-admission on the Monday. Like I have said before; this is not the Fontan surgery. This is an exploratory procedure that involves inserting a thin hollow tube into an artery or vein which will then be threaded all the way to the heart; this helps give them the best picture of how her heart is currently functioning.

They then present all of this information at a conference of all the major players who will be involved in her surgery; from there they will pick a date for it (which could be weeks or months later). It is still a scary thing for a four year old to go through and the procedure (like any) has it's risks; she had to do this a couple of times when she was a baby and we were never particularly keen for it to happen but knew it was necessary.

It's typically only a day procedure but it all depends on how quickly she recovers. They do say that single ventricle kids can sometimes take a little bit longer and if that's the case then she may need to stay in over night.

Jess and I both feel a sense of relief to finally have a bit of certainty about the future; it was always this intangible thing of not knowing when everything would be set in motion once more. So we could never really make any concrete plans for 2018 or tell anyone anything when they asked when it was happening. Now at least we know a little.

Otherwise Riley is doing really well. She had her birthday party on this past weekend; her theme of choice was "Purple". For some reason our kids just pick a random colour for their parties lately. Last year her colour of choice was pink and Maya's was green. I am sure one day they will move onto "My Little Pony" or something like that but for now they are just sticking with colours. 

She did have a really good time and then we got to spend Tuesday (on her actual birthday) spoiling her; though I did almost get driven to the brink of my sanity assembling her new bike! Thankfully she loved it. Another one of the gifts she loved was a doctors kit which she and her sister seem to enjoy using at length to do check ups on everyone in the family; I do wonder if she will be as big of a fan of doctors after February though. Probably not. 

We'd ask that you keep her in your prayers in the lead up to this; that she would not become unwell in the lead up (which can cause rescheduling because they need her to be 100% for it), also that she would be brave and not back down from the challenges that lay ahead of her; and of course that she would just fly right through all of this and what's still ahead. Even though we are on the verge of going through all of this again; we know it's all going to be okay. God's still got this and we are also encouraged that this year at church the theme is "Anything's Possible" so we are going to claim that the miraculous can and will happen for her in 2018.