Only God has done it

It was a desperately prayerful father that broke my heart in early May, as I sat down to write a scattered blog post and mourn our limitations.  Two-year-old Josi lay intubated in the ICU with no clear hope of recovery.  She had been transferred to us from a local hospital, and everything we tried so far had failed.  David refused to eat, fasting as he prayed aloud over his little girl, again and again claiming the blood of Jesus over her life.  Their only other child had died just a few months before.

Unlike many of our other patients on ship, Josi was just a normal toddler – happy and healthy less than two weeks before, no tumors or deformities to scar her face or twist her body, and the most beautiful bright-eyed grin you ever saw.  It was the pebble she had inhaled that threatened her life now – and after hours and hours of trying our surgeons could not get it back out.

The 5:30 am call blared into every hallway, every cabin, and woke me up out of a deep sleep, “Emergency Medical Team to the ICU STAT, Emergency Medical Team to the ICU stat.”

Josi was our only ICU patient that night.

I won’t take you through the early morning, through the CPR the previous night, or the days of wondering if a two year old be sentenced to die by slow inches as her breathing failed…just because she was born in the wrong country?  Why was this family who had already lost so much losing another? 

As David prayed and we joined in with him over those few days, impossible things happened.  A girl that by all rights should have died in a local hospital days ago was still alive.  In the middle of the night a Pediatric ICU nurse had trouble sleeping and walked down to the ICU, just in time to do CPR.  The next night Josi had breathing difficulties and so many staff responded within a few minutes that we had our very own code prayer team.  When all our transfer plans had fallen through, a pediatric thoracic surgeon who had never heard of Mercy Ships before flew in from Kenya to do the surgery and put in a chest tube, assisted by a pediatric anesthetist that left a few days later.  The funding, resources and staff were all provided, just when they were needed.

I got off the phone Monday afternoon with the OR supervisor and walked through the ICU door…”David, the Operating Room just called – they got the rock out of Josi’s lung and she’s doing fine.”
I can still see him, jumping up and down with tears streaming down his face, rejoicing for his world to hear, “Only God has done it, only the blood of Jesus has saved my Josi.”