14 DAY TRIAL // Little Ava Mear is definitely a miracle child as she survived four heart attacks in 45 minutes after her body had a rare reaction to a sore throat bacterium.
The five-year-old girl, from Bedfordshire, was left fighting for her life after suffering from a serious form of Strep A infection. Her parents, Clive and Mary-Jane Mear, rushed her to Luton and Dunstable Hospital when she started breathing heavily.
Staff at the hospital ran a series of tests and decided to transfer her to Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in London.
The girl's parents say their daughter turned purple after she developed a nasty rash which spread all over her body. In addition, doctors pumped fluids through her body in a bid to clear her of infection, which made her balloon in size.
“Ava looked like Violet from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, bless her. She was purple from head to toe. She’s our little miracle,” the girl's father said, according to Daily Mail.
Medics at GOSH realized Ava had suffered a toxic shock reaction to Strep A and explained that the infection took hold of her body.
The worst part came the next they, when her body's extreme reaction to the common bacterium caused her heart to fail three times in quick succession. Doctors at the London hospital feared Ava would not survive another resuscitation and told her parents to prepare for the worst.
She was very weak, so no one thought she would be able to survive a fourth cardiac arrest. However, the unthinkable happened after just 15 minutes, when her heart stopped for the fourth time. But luckily, this time she was hooked up to an artificial lung and heart machine, which oxygenated her blood and pumped it round the body.
“If she had been at a hospital with no ability to bypass her heart she wouldn’t be here today. My wife was like mush in my arms. You are numb, it is like you are on rails on a journey, you are in a process and you have to keep going,” Clive Mear said.
Ava is now back at Luton and Dunstable Hospital and recovering well, her parents say. The girl also suffers from a genetic condition called Cerebro-costo-mandibular Syndrome, which means she has no ribs on the front of her body.
Her parents are now attempting to raise £80,000 ($134,000 or €97,000) to buy two more ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machines for the hospital where she was treated.