OPERATOR: 911, what is your emergency?

WOMAN: (CRYING) Yes, I have a little boy that's drowned.

I think we're too late.

NARRATOR: Amy Otteson and her family

were vacationing in several cabins

on the Gunnison River in Colorado,

just as they did every 4th of July.

But as Amy was getting her three children ready for bed,

she noticed two-year-old Gore was missing.

I kind of went out to the porch when he didn't

hear my caller answer me.

And that's when I saw that the screen

door latch had been undone.

NARRATOR: Amy called out to the family, who spread out

to search the 40-acre property.

I was having such a feeling of just sheer terror or panic.

My worst fear-- we're not going to find him,

and I'm never going to know what happened.

NARRATOR: After 25 minutes, Amy heard

a cry coming from the irrigation ditch that

ran behind her cabin.

But it wasn't her sons.

And I rounded the bend on the far side of the irrigation

ditch, and I could see my cousin holding Gore in his arms

and just-- he was limp, just white as a ghost.

NARRATOR: He found Gore trapped under a log in the ditch.

Amy's mother called 911.

Amy's father, a retired surgeon, and her cousin Suzanne,

a nurse, began CPR.

He was not breathing.

He had no heartbeat.

He was notorious for rosy cheeks,

and he did not have that.

He was completely pale.

He was dead.

NARRATOR: When the ambulance arrived 15 minutes later,

Gore still had no heartbeat.

It's over.

It's over.

I remember even hearing the ambulance sirens and thinking,

it's so silly that they even have their sirens on

and they're coming out here.

It's been too long.

NARRATOR: What made it even harder for Amy

was that her husband Dave was in Denver working four hours away.

He remembers getting the call from Amy's mother.

Gore may have drowned was the only thing that she said,

and the call got disconnected.

In my car, alone, not really being

able to talk with any relatives about anything that

had happened because I didn't know at that point,

it was really between me and my windshield

and God, where I literally found myself screaming,

don't take him.

(CRYING)

NARRATOR: Gore was rushed to the local hospital, where

friends and other family had gathered

in the waiting room to pray.

So immediately, were praying that he would even

begin to breathe again, that his heart would

start to beat again.

And a nurse came in and she said, we've got a heartbeat.

I was so shocked.

After all this time, of almost an hour

of thinking that he wasn't even alive, I thought to myself,

he has a heartbeat.

He has a heartbeat.

I think I was so relieved and also maybe scared--

scared of being hopeful.

NARRATOR: Then Gore began breathing

and was Life-Flighted to Children's Hospital in Denver.

While Amy and her parents were making the long drive,

Dave arrived at the hospital.

There were three doctors in that ER scene,

and each one of them came up to me and said some type

of variation of, well, Dave, there's-- I want to say

"there's less than a 1% chance that he will ever walk or talk

again.

It's unlikely that he will have any normal brain function,"

end quote.

To hear that, that your kids are going to be taken away from you

and be brain dead, it's the biggest punch in the gut

that you've seen.

NARRATOR: By the time Amy and her parents arrived,

Gore was on a ventilator with little hope of survival.

Doctors told Amy and Dave the only thing left to try

was therapeutic hypothermia, an experimental treatment where

they would lower Gore's body temperature for 48

hours in an attempt to reduce brain swelling.

Amy reached her breaking point.

And I ended up in this parking lot near the hospital,

and I just kept saying, God, I need to understand this.

I need to understand.

I mean, we were literally at this point

thinking we were going to be donating his organs.

At that moment in time, I just started thinking, Lord,

I want total healing.

I don't want to be faced with this decision.

Lord, I need you to come and just heal him completely.

I, as clear as day, felt an overwhelming sense of peace

that I've never experienced sense.

And I felt God saying, I am in complete control.

I am in complete control.

NARRATOR: Over the next 48 hours,

friends and family across the country prayed for Gore.

With the treatment over, Amy and Dave

waited as medical staff slowly brought Gore's body temperature

back to normal.

Then finally, he opened his eyes.

It felt like, gosh, God, I knew you were big, but this is huge.

This is huger than anything that we can in our human minds

even imagine.

I thought, Lord, you have heard all these hundreds if not

thousands of people praying for Gore, and you've responded.

Just to see him open his eyes again

was something I thought I was never going to see again.

NARRATOR: The next day doctors took Gore off the ventilator

and ordered an MRI.

And we received a phone call.

(CRYING) We received a phone call of the MRI results.

And they said no abnormalities.

To hear that there was no abnormalities for a child that

had been under water for over 20 minutes and without a heartbeat

for-- I think they finally decided it was somewhere

between 50, 55 minutes without a heartbeat

and not have a single abnormality in his brain

was-- I mean, I knew it was God.

I knew He'd answered our prayers.

NARRATOR: After a month of rehab,

gore walked out of the hospital.

The family believes there's only one way

to explain his recovery.

No brain damage with the worst scores of all time-- trauma

score was zero-- it's definitely a miracle.

NARRATOR: Today, Gore is just shy of his eighth birthday.

He doesn't remember what happened that day

but tells his friends the one thing he is certain of.

I fell in a ditch when I was almost two,

and it was a miracle.

So they're like, but if you died,

how are you right here now?

I'm like, because it's a miracle.

We feel like our prayers were answered 3,000-fold.

He's the joy in our lives, and he's still

a handful, which a lot of 7-year-old boys are.

And so he's just a pure joy to see him smile and live

a normal life.

Seeing a miracle firsthand to the degree that we saw this,

I always believed I had such a strong faith

and knew that God performed these miracles.

But I just thought, Lord, wow, that is incredible that You

didn't just give us him living.

You gave us our son perfectly whole-- perfectly whole.