Please Pray for Ethan

Ethan is a smallish 14 year old boy with blond hair and blue eyes. He's Russian by birth. Our friends from church Cherisse and Brian went to Russia and adopted him when he was 3. His birth mother abandoned him at a hospital there because he had many health problems. Ethan had a hole in his heart, a leaky valve and rythym problems since birth. He used to turn blue. When he came to America with his new family, he had a new valve put in, the hole repaired, and a pacemaker implanted in his tiny chest.

Ethan has grown up at our church and our Christian school. He's smart, funny, cute, and still very small and frail. He's been asking my daughter, who is 20, out since he was a little kid. He loved the teenage girls and never could decide which one he liked the best and which one he was going to marry when he grew up. His health has been very guarded all through his little life.

Ethan got sick right after Christmas with some kind of bug. After a couple of weeks, his mom took him to the doctor where they determined that due to some kind of infection his kidneys were trying to shut down. They airlifted him to the children's ICU at Medical City in Dallas. He's almost died a couple of times since being there. The doctors said that he has a staph infection in the artificial valve in his heart and he has sepsis in his system.

The doctors have been pumping him full of 3 different antibiotics for the last couple of weeks fearing that the infection could break off and travel to another part of his body. They have to keep him sedated to allow his heart to rest because when he's awake, he's fighting the many tubes in his body. They have him untubated, and the battery that was in his pacemaker was supposed to last for 2 more years is down to a few weeks because his heart has been working so hard.

This morning, as I post, he is in surgery. He is on a heart/lung bipass machine, they are replacing the valve in his heart, and are inserting an outside temporary pacemaker to be replaced by a permanent one in about 3 weeks after the infection is hopefully gone.

I believe in the power of God and the power of prayer. I believe that God is merciful and that He can do anything if it is His will. Ethan has many people, known and unknown, our church and many other churches in the brotherhood, praying for him. But I have a whole 'nuther LEGION of people out there in blogland that I know I can depend on to lift little Ethan up in prayer. Thank you for your prayers. I'll keep you posted on his progress.