A 5-year-old boy was hit by a car so violently that his heart stopped. A stranger driving by saw what was happening, stopped, and performed CPR. Michael came back.

But his mother, Anabella, was soon confronted with questions no parent is prepared to hear. Would her little boy ever walk again? Talk again? Breathe on his own? Would he ever be the same Michael she knew before that day?

Michael was hit by a car while in the care of a family member. His injuries were extensive. According to his mother, he suffered a Grade 3 traumatic brain injury, a skull fracture, facial fractures, a fractured hip, and a fractured thumb. Then his pulse stopped.

A woman who happened to be driving by stopped and performed CPR, helping bring Michael back. Anabella calls her nothing short of “an angel on earth.” “To think about what could’ve happened if she wasn’t driving by at the exact time it happened is something I can’t even fathom,” she said.

Michael spent four weeks in the intensive care unit at Children’s Mercy. Initially, the prognosis was grim. Doctors could not tell his mother whether her son would walk, talk, or breathe independently again.

Yet Michael has begun answering some of those questions himself. He is now off the ventilator and breathing on his own. After everything his little body has endured, his mom says he is “defying every odd.”

Another enormous challenge lies ahead. Michael is preparing to leave Children’s Mercy and move to inpatient rehabilitation at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals in Omaha. There, his mother says, he will work on relearning some of the most basic things most people never think twice about: eating, walking, and talking.

At just 5 years old, he is essentially being asked to fight his way back to pieces of the childhood that were taken from him in an instant.

After what happened, Anabella has a message she hopes another parent never has to learn the way she did: “Never let your guard down.” She believed her child was safe with family and says she never imagined something like this could happen.

Please cover this little boy in prayer. Pray for Michael’s brain to continue healing. Pray that he learns to eat, walk, and talk again. Pray for his mom as she stays beside him through what could be a very long recovery. And pray for the stranger who stopped that day—because one decision to pull over may have changed the course of this little boy’s life.

Sources Account shared by Michael’s mother, Anabella (social media / family updates regarding treatment at Children’s Mercy and upcoming transfer to Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals in Omaha).