Grammy-Award Winning Casting Crowns Member Waits for New Heart for 5-Month-Old Son
The #PrayForSilas hashtag, created for the five-month-old son of Grammy Award-winning Christian band Casting Crowns bassist Chris Huffman, is going viral on social media even as "Super Silas" recovers from a surgery that will help him survive for some time until he gets a donor heart.
Doctors at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Ga., placed Silas Huffman, whose heart is too large and too week, on a Berlin Heart pump on Thursday. Thanks perhaps to prayers being offered from people across the country and beyond, parents Chris and Amanda Huffman describe Silas' recovery as astonishingly quick, according to Fox 5 Atlanta.
Fox 5 posted a superimposed picture of Silas, creating "Super Silas," on its Facebook page Friday evening. Within hours, it received about 3,500 "likes" and 200 people shared it on their walls. The post also received more than 100 comments. "God will make a way, He Always Has," commented a couple from North Carolina.
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"#prayforSilas God is amazing! Even when things aren't so good, God is always good," Chris Huffman wrote on Twitter, which carries a long string of tweets under the hashtag.
Doctors said Silas' enlarged heart was half as large as it was before surgery. Silas was in the cardiac intensive care unit until early Saturday.
On his earlier bed in the hospital, friends and family put up a picture of "Super Silas" with the quote "Stronger than Average."
"His heart is half the size it was when it was dilated, so it's kind of gotten back where it should be, as far as size-wise, which is the best news I've heard all day today," Chris Huffman, who plays bass in Casting Crowns, was quoted as saying.
The Huffmans have been stunned by the response they have seen on social media. "It's unexplainable. They don't even know our boy, but they've just fallen in love with him," said the father.
"It blows my mind that he is touching that many, in his five short months of life, he's touched people from all over," added Amanda Huffman. "We got a letter from Australia yesterday."
After the surgery, Chris Huffman said, "From here we just wait until we get the phone call that they have a heart donor and they begin prepping for transplant."
Silas has been on the heart transplant waiting list since Sept. 11.
"For a mom, when I'm praying, I'm praying for heart for Silas," Amanda Huffman added. "But on the other hand, another family is going to have to lose a child. So, as a mom, how do you pray, how do you pray for that?"
Two years ago, the 5-month-old son of a member of another Christian band underwent a heart surgery as he was born with only half his heart working.
Baby Bowen Hammitt, son of Sanctus Real's lead vocalist Matt Hammitt, underwent two heart surgeries.
After the second surgery in March 2011, Matt Hammitt posted on the blog Bowen's Heart verses from Psalm 116:1-5: "I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live. The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish. Then I called on the name of the Lord: 'O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul!' Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful."
