Please Pray for this Little Boy Alex and His Family

Hello everyone. I got an email from my friend Jen and one of her co-workers family members sent her an email with the following:

All – I am writing this morning to ask for your prayers. My niece Amy & her husband Eric have two children, Alex (4) and Abby (21mo). Alex was complaining on Monday that his neck hurt & was walking a bit funny. However, after dinner Monday, he went outside to play in the yard with the kids in the next door. During the night he was up a lot complaining how his neck hurt & he spiked a fever. My niece got dressed for work Tuesday, but took him to the pediatrician to see if it was an ear infection or something. They sent her to the hospital with Alex. Children’s began to run all kind of tests on him. A few hours after being at the hospital, Alex lost all feeling and motion from his chest down. They ran all kind of tests on him eliminating, meningitis, h1n1, guillain-barre syndrome. Finally close to 7pm they came in and told my niece & Eric that he had a mass in his spinal cord & needed immediate surgery. My sister & brother-in-law were at the hospital at this time & the neurosurgeon explained the procedure and that Alex had a lot of bleeding in the spinal cord. The way he explained it to them, Eric asked “are you telling us this is life or death?” The neurosurgeon responded “Yes”. After 3-4 hours of surgery Tuesday night, they determined Alex had a mass of blood vessels in his spine, removed them, put titanium clips in his spine & brought him to ICU. He was on a ventilator. The good news was that it wasn’t bleeding as bad as they thought & he survived the surgery. Wednesday, he was very heavily sedated but was able to blink with closed eyes & nod his head. He was given a feeding tube on Thursday & they tried to remove the ventilator after his oxygen levels increased. Thursday the pathology report came back & showed no tumor cells or cancer in the blood mass they removed. He showed signs of reflexes in his arms & toes. We thought he was making good progress, plus he was able to urinate which they weren’t sure he’d be able to do on his own. We knew he still had a long road ahead of him with therapy but were feeling better about his prognosis. Unfortunately, Friday afternoon they had to put the breathing tube back in because his oxygen levels fell. The reason I’m writing now is about 3:30 this morning he showed signs of complete paralyzation again and his fever spiked to 102. They performed another MRI because they were afraid the mass had returned. Thankfully the MRI was clean but did show excessive swelling. He has been heavily sedated and will be in ICU for a few more days. They still don’t know if he will ever have use of his arms or legs again, currently he has no reflexes at all. Nor do they know what caused this mass. They are testing for blood disorders and will be checking my niece and her husband.

Please add this sweet boy and his family on to any prayer list and keep him in your prayers! You can keep updated on his blog, https://www.carepages.com/carepages/ChuckandBear. You will need to become a 'member' of carepages if you are not already one. It is free, you just need to create a screen name and password. Thanks all for your prayers for this little boy and his family!

God Bless you all!!

God Bless Caleb!!