Easter is a day when Christians around the world celebrate Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead. But for one family, the holiday will forever also be celebrated as the day their son experienced a miraculous revival of his own.
Two years ago, the Askin family experienced their own Easter miracle when their critically ill 2-year-old son, Dylan, made an amazing recovery.
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“I am not massively religious, but I did think it was a miracle,” Kerry Askin, Dylan’s mother, told the Daily Mail.
Dylan woke up from a coma one day after his parents made the difficult decision to take him off of life support.
It all began in 2015 on Christmas Day when Dylan started having trouble breathing. His parents rushed him to the hospital, where they determined he had one collapsed lung, and cysts covering both lungs.
Dylan was diagnosed with Pulmonary Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis (PLCH), a type of cancer that causes cysts on the lungs. Soon after he developed pneumonia, which landed him in the hospital again. Dylan’s condition worsened, and the doctors made it clear to his parents that his chance of recovery was slim to none.
The Askins decided to take Dylan off of life support and prepared to say goodbye.
The day after Good Friday, as doctors started to take Dylan off of life support, they saw that his heart rate was returning to normal.
“On Good Friday they told us things were looking bleak and that we weren’t going to get him back. All the settings on all the machines were at their highest and he was still struggling. We had him christened, all his family came from all over to say goodbye, including his big brother,” Kerry Askin said.
The family told the doctors to hold off.
“We just said, ‘Stop; there is still fight in him. Then his oxygen levels started to pick up, and he started coming back to us. By Easter Sunday, he was stable enough that I felt comfortable enough to have a lie-down. I was strong in that belief that he was our Easter miracle,” Kerry said.
The Askin family’s older son compared Dylan’s miraculous recovery to that of Jesus’, which he was learning about in school.
“When we told our eldest, he said, ‘He’s like Jesus’ – because he had been learning about it in school,” Kerry recalled.
One month after his miraculous comeback, Dylan’s family brought him home. He continued with chemotherapy for the next year and a half until July 2017.
Today Dylan is a healthy 4-year-old and the face of CLIC Sargent, a foundation that helped his family immensely while he was sick.
“For us it took all of the pressure off as we were living in the hospital and it was one less thing to worry about,” Kerry said of the organization. “We would say what we were struggling with and she would find a solution. It meant we could spend our quality time with our children. It has made us see the value of our time with them so much. What CLIC Sargent gave us was invaluable – they gave us the gift of time with our child when we thought we didn’t have much left.”
The Askin family recently helped with an Easter campaign for CLIC Sargent, hoping to increase funding for the charity that made their lives so much easier. Learn more HERE.