Prayers urgently asked again for young Mikko

Mikko with his mother, Gee-Gee

Three months ago I asked your prayers for young Mikko, now three-and-a-half, who was in the ICU near Atlanta, Georgia. I got an email today from his father Miggy and his mother Gee-Gee who was my assistant editor before at http://www.misyononline.com/ before she married, telling me that her son in in the ICU once again. Here is part of their email:

Please keep Mikko in your prayers. We had to call 911 on Tuesday at around 2pm. Mikko's temperature dropped to 28 degrees celsius (37 is normal) and he was still desatting even with 4 liters per minute (LPM) of oxygen support ('Desatting' is a word I hadn't heard before. It has to do with the level of saturation of oxygen in the blood's haemoglobin). Normally he would be okay with 0.5-2 LPM. The nurses at the ER said that Mikko's toes were beginning to turn blue when they took off his socks at the ER.

Yesterday afternoon he was retracting (having difficulty in breathing. Again, a term I wasn't familiar with). for 2 hours. We made the difficult decision of letting the doctors intubate (putting a flexible plastic tube into the trachea to enable breathing) him. But thank God we didn't have to do the intubation. When the team was getting ready, Mikko started to relax. What a big relief! His pulmonologist explained that there is a possibility that when they intubate him, he'll be on a ventilator for life which translates to having a tracheostomy. Today Mikko had difficulty breathing again around noon. But as of this time, he's sleeping.

Mikko's condition is worse than the last time he was here in the hospital. His condition is up and down right now. So far, he is not yet out of the woods yet, so he could still get intubated. He's on 15 LPM of oxygen today. They were pushing 25 LPM of oxygen into him yesterday afternoon, when the doctors thought of intubating him.

We are afraid of the outcome of this hospitalization. We are more worried now as his condition had never been up and down before. Usually, he'd get worse, but when he'd get better, it would go all the way quickly. But now, it seems like he gets a little better, then takes a turn for the worse again.

The doctors are talking to us already about "Quality of Life" again -- that we have to start thinking about it for Mikko. The last time they talked to us about that was when he was just a day old and they were predicting his death.

We are afraid, but still hopeful that Mikko will overcome this challenge once again, as he's done before.