In an almost-unbelievable turn of events, Kerry and Mike Askin have revealed that their three-year-old son Dylan has made an astonishing recovery after being diagnosed with a rare type of lung cancer (which causes cysts to grow on the lungs) called pulmonary langerhans cell histiocytosis in February this year.
The youngster’s health plummeted after his lungs collapsed last Christmas Day; he showed signs of recovery before he was finally diagnosed with this cancer, but the cysts had burst and were causing his lungs to be starved from oxygen.
During his treatment in Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, tragedy struck the family again, with doctors confirming that on top of his oxygen saturation levels dropping, Dylan had also developed in infection, causing his temperature to sky-rocket.
Not long after, doctors told Kerry and Mike, who are also parents to Bryce, six, and four-month-old Logan, that Dylan’s organs were failing and that there was nothing else they could do. The doting parents were then faced with the heartbreaking decision of when to turn their son’s life support off.
Dylan just days after doctors decided against turning his life support off.
“He’s so close to his brothers it was such a hard decision, but the doctors said his organs were failing and there was nothing they could do,” Kerry remembers, as reported by The Telegraph.
“We baptised him and said our final goodbyes and at 8am on the Saturday they turned his muscle sedatives off in preparation for the ventilator to be switched off.
“But when they did that suddenly he started struggling in his bed. We thought he was brain dead from oxygen starvation, so he shouldn’t have been moving.”
After both of his lungs collapsed, the now-jovial toddler is lucky to be alive.
The happy toddler with his brothers Bryce and Logan.
It was then that blood tests showed that Dylan’s organs weren’t failing at all. And after three more weeks in intensive care, Dylan was sent home.
Since then, the Askin family have celebrated two important milestones on Dylan’s road to recovery: he hasn’t had to have his lungs drained in more than six months and he has returned to daycare.
Dylan with his loving mum, Kerry.
“We had told Bryce that Dylan wasn’t coming back, so when we explained that he had got better Dylan said: ‘Oh, so he’s like Jesus then,” Kerry reflects.
“I said, ‘you’re not wrong’. He had just risen from the dead.”
