A prayer request from India

Our dear friends from Minnesota are now missionaries in India. Christo is an emergency medicine physician. He has been plagued by a lot of losses in his job and is really feeling worn down. Everyone there could use a small little miracle, and they are hoping this baby is that miracle! Please add this child to your prayer list. (You can read Christo's note below the pictures.)

The grandfather works hard to keep his granddaughter alive by manually ventilating her with a bag and mask.

Would you lift up this little infant in your prayers that we care caring for at Duncan Hospital? She is about a month old, was born premature at 1.4 kg and family took her home after one week because of financial problems. She came back to the hospital two weeks later essentially dead - small gasping breath every 20 seconds and not moving arms or legs and no cry. Oxygen saturation was so low it was unmeasurable. She was cold and gray. I wasn't sure if we should even do anything for this baby except for comfort care since she looked so sick and the chance of survival was so low but somehow felt that we should try everything possible. She was intubated but then we could not find an IV line anywhere and so we ended up putting in an intraosseous line in the right tibia to give her fluids and dopamine to keep her blood pressure up. Against all odds she was extubated off the ventilator 5 days after intubation now moving her arms and legs and tolerating nasogastric feeds. She has increased her weight now to 1.5 kg when I saw her yesterday in the nursery but she still looks so sick. Please pray that this little girl might somehow survive. On top of her illness she comes from a very poor family and the mother is mentally handicapped and so it has been difficult to convince them to keep her in the hospital even with the offer to write off a large part of the bill. It would do a lot for our spirits to see this little girl make it. -- Christo