Parent’s Faith Tested After Drowned Son Faces Death

“911, what is your emergency?”

Caller: “Yes, I have a little boy that’s drowned. I think we’re too late.”

Amy and her family were vacationing in several cabins on the Gunnison River in Colorado, just as they did every 4th of July. But as Amy was getting her three children ready for bed, she noticed two-year-old gore was missing.  “I kinda went out to the porch when he didn't you know, hear my call or answer me and that's when I saw that the screen door latch had been undone.”

Amy called out to the family, who spread out to search the 40-acre property. She says, “I was having such a feeling of just sheer terror, panic my worst fear.  You know, ‘We're not going to find him and I'm never going to know what happened.’"

After 25 minutes, Amy heard a cry coming from the irrigation ditch that ran behind her cabin. But it wasn’t her son’s. She says, “And I rounded the bend on the far side of the irrigation ditch and I could see my cousin holding Gore in his arms and just – he was limp…and white. Just white as a ghost.”

He found Gore trapped under a log in the ditch. Amy’s mother called 911, Amy’s father, a retired surgeon, and her cousin Suzanne, a nurse, began CPR.

Suzanne says, “He was not breathing.  He had no heartbeat. He was notorious for rosy cheeks, and he did not have that.  He was completely pal - he was dead.”

When the ambulance arrived 15 minutes later, Gore still had no heartbeat. Amy said, "'It's over.  It's over.' I remember even hearing the ambulance sirens and thinking, ‘It's so silly that they're even have their sirens on. It's been too long.’" 

What made it even harder for Amy was that her husband Dave was in Denver working, four hours away.  He remembers getting the call from Amy’s mother. “‘Gore may have drowned,” was the only thing that she said. "And the call got disconnected. And in my car, alone, not really being able to talk with any relatives about anything that had happened, cause I didn't know at that point, it was really between me and my windshield and God where I literally found myself screaming, ‘Don't take him!’”

Gore was rushed to the local hospital, where friends and other family had gathered in the waiting room to pray. Amy says, “So immediately people were praying that he would even begin to breathe again, that his heart would start to beat again. A nurse came in and she said, ‘We've got a heartbeat.’ and I was so shocked, after all this time of almost an hour of thinking that he wasn't even alive, I thought to myself, ‘He has a heartbeat, he has a heartbeat.’ I was so relieved and also maybe scared.  Scared of being hopeful.”

Then Gore began breathing and was life-flighted to children’s hospital in Denver.  While Amy and her parents were making the long drive, Dave arrived at the hospital. He says, “There were three doctors in that ER scene and each one of them came up to me and said some type of variation of ‘Well, Dave, let's see, there's less than a one percent chance that he will ever walk or talk again. It's unlikely that he will have any normal brain function.’ To hear that, that your kid's going to be taken away from you and be brain dead, it's the biggest punch in the gut that you've ever seen.”

By the time Amy and her parents arrived, gore was on a ventilator with little hope of survival. Doctors told Amy and Dave the only thing left to try was therapeutic hypothermia - an experimental treatment where they would lower Gore’s body temperature for 48 hours, in an attempt to reduce brain swelling.  Amy reached her breaking point. She says, “I ended up in this parking lot near the hospital and I just kept saying, ‘God, I need to understand this.  I need to understand.’  I mean, we were literally at this point thinking we were going to be donating his organs. And at that moment in time I just started thinking, ‘Lord, I want total healing.  I don't want to be faced with this decision.’ ‘Lord, I need you to come and just heal him completely.’ I, as clear as day, felt an overwhelming sense of peace that I've never experienced since. And I felt God saying, ‘I am in complete control.  I am in complete control.’”

Over the next 48 hours, friends and family across the country prayed for gore.  With the treatment over, Amy and Dave waited as medical staff slowly brought Gore’s body temperature back to normal. Then finally, he opened his eyes. Dave says, “It felt like ‘Gosh God, I knew you were big, but this is huge.  This is huger than anything that we can, in our human minds, even imagine.’”

Amy says, “I thought, ‘Lord, you have heard all these hundreds, if not thousands, of people praying for Gore, and you've responded.’ Just to see him open his eyes again was something I thought I was never going to see again.”

The next day doctors took Gore off the ventilator and ordered an MRI. Dave remembers, “We received a phone call we received a phone call of the MRI results and, you know, they said ‘No abnormalities.’”

Amy says, “To hear that there was no abnormalities for a child that had been underwater for over 20 minutes and 50, 55 minutes without a heartbeat, and not have a single abnormality in his brain was – I mean, I knew it was God.  I knew he'd answered our prayers.”

After a month of rehab, Gore walked out of the hospital. The family believes there’s only one way to explain his recovery.

Suzanne says, “No brain damage, with the worst scores of all time, trauma score was zero; it's definitely a miracle.” 

Today Gore is just shy of his 8th birthday. He doesn’t remember what happened that day, but tells his friends the one thing he is certain of.  “I fell in a ditch when I was almost two, and it was a miracle so – and they're like, ‘But if you died, how are you right here now?’ I'm like, ‘Because it's a miracle.’" 

Dave says, “We feel like our prayers were answered three thousand-fold. He's a joy in our lives and he's still and handful, which a lot of 7-year-old boys are.  And so he's just a pure joy to see him smile and-and live a normal life.”

Amy says, “Seeing the miracle firsthand to the degree that we saw this, I always believed – had such a strong faith, and knew that God performed these miracles,  I knew, but I just thought, ‘Lord, wow!  That is incredible that you, you didn't just give us him living, you gave us our son perfectly whole.  Perfectly whole.’"