BRIDGEPORT — The way Colleen Young Walczak sees it, she has three choices for her daughter Ava, a 6-year-old Bridgeport girl battling a devastating heart ailment.
Option one: subject the kindergarten graduate to another artery-ballooning procedure, a grueling surgery which she has barely survived.
Option two: Fly to California and take a shot with a risky open-heart surgery designed to relieve pressure on Ava's heart — an operation that, even if it's perfectly successful, won't cure the young girl but will prolong her life.
Option three: Do nothing, and let Ava live a somewhat-normal life until she "has a heart attack or stroke and just expires. ... She'll slowly deteriorate if we don't touch her at all."
"I've been asked a million times. No one understands the decisions a parent has to make. Out of the three decisions, I don't win and it drives me crazy that I have to keep explaining that," said Young Walczak.
After endlessly weighing the options, Young Walczak decided she and Ava will fly to the West Coast in August for the open heart surgery.
To help pay for the rising medical costs and travel expenses — and to garner emotional support for Ava — Young Walczak and friends have started a "Hope for Ava" T-shirt campaign.
The T-shirts, available by messaging the Hope for Ava Facebook group, cost $5 and Young Walczak hopes people will post pictures of themselves wearing the shirts.
On the morning of Aug. 27 — the day of the surgery — she'll show Ava all of the the photos before she goes under and when she wakes up.
"If she pulls through," Young Walczak cautioned. "She'll be intubated for seven days."
Diagnosed with the heart defect Tetraology of Fallot moments after she was born in 2008, Ava Walczak has battled through multiple open heart surgeries and dealt with a series of medical setbacks ever since.
Doctors say the girl's heart is working five times harder than normal, and if the pressure on her heart remains that intense, it will affect the length and quality of her life.
For now, Ava is mostly smiles, her mother said.
She celebrated her 6th birthday last month with a big family trip to an amusement park. And she just learned to swim.
Meanwhile, Young Walczak, a Mercy Hospital employee, said she's confident about her choice.
She's bought two one-way plane tickets to California.
"I don't know what I'll come back to," she said. "But it's a chance I'm willing to take."
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