After bringing home a baby boy who was completely healthy but had a 90% probability of dying soon after delivery, one father is praising the benefits of prayer.
Nick Schnarr explains in a widely shared Facebook post that his wife Brooklyn has been carrying a “very sick baby boy” for the past nine months.
Doctors told Nick and Brooklyn their newborn child had hydrocephalus, sometimes known as “water on the brain,” several months into the pregnancy.
“We were referred to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, where we were told by several of the most highly regarded fetal specialists in the country that his condition was dire,” Nick said. “The baby’s condition was ‘off the charts bad’. It was so extreme that the specialists stopped measuring and monitoring his fluid level because, at that point, it didn’t really matter. The MRI’s were sickening to look at.”
Nick and Brooklyn were informed that their child had over 90% chance to either pass away soon after birth or suffer from significant cognitive disabilities, making it difficult to conceive any kind of quality of life.
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So they began to plan. Despite the terrifying outcome physicians predicted for their son, the couple still intended to give birth to him. They discussed how to maintain his life when he was born and how long they would do so before allowing the kid to “die peacefully” in “detailed, unpleasant, and emotional discussions.”
The day finally arrived after moving to a motel in Cincinnati to be close to the hospital for labor. July 8, 2016 was the day that Brooklyn gave birth. Before the medical staff took Brooklyn into the operating room for a C-section, they had one more discussion with Nick by her side about the use of breathing tubes and allowing the baby “travel to heaven.”
“Guess what?” Nick continues. “The baby came out crying – which was the sweetest sound I ever heard.
The couple called their kid Charlie, who was born sobbing but also flourishing. Charlie, Nick, and Brooklyn all left the NICU after just eight days and went home together.
According to Nick, “He’s seems to be a normal, beautiful baby doing all the things that babies do. He has mild ventricular enlargement, but we can deal with that with checkups.”
“The doctors said, ‘We do not have and cannot come up with a medical explanation for what we’ve witnessed here’. Somehow his brain found a way to naturally clear the blockage or re-route the fluid that was causing the oppressive back up of brain fluid.”
During their time in the hospital with Charlie, Nick said he heard the terms “divine intervention” and “miracle” more times than he could count.
Experienced nurses with decades of practice and renowned, nationally acclaimed doctors were stunned yet ecstatic.
Nick credits God for everything, saying they could see the “domino effect” of prayer at work as friends, family, coworkers, and total strangers prayed for them, Charlie, and their family.
“I’m a practical person that certainly believes in science and medical technology, but I absolutely know, from the bottom of my heart, that God was involved in this,” Nick writes. “I give ALL of the credit and glory to Him. Prayer is positively powerful. God is real, and He still performs miracles.”
