From the brink of death to a day of gratitude for Reid Burrell

Image 1 of 3

A year ago, on this very day, gratitude in a Sugarland home had given way to anguish.

"We knew it was serious when they said we needed to go the ultrasound, right now!" said Jerry Burrell, the father of then four month old Reid.

You see little Reid was dying, his tiny liver slowly dissolving from the inside out.

Without a transplant, his young life would end before it had much of a chance to begin.

Friends and family and lots of people the little boy would never know, steadily barraged the heavens pleading for intervention.

"We wait, we pray," said Reid's mother Heather Burrell a year ago in an interview with Fox 26.

In the torturous weeks and then months that followed,  Reid crept closer to the place from which he could not return.

"His liver completely shut down and he bled out," said Heather.

But then in the wake of more than a dozen gut wrenching disappointments, it came. Deliverance, in the nick of time, from a matching donor.

In the six months since Reid has grown steadily right along with his family's belief.

"It's truly a story of faith, because there's no other way to look at it. There's no other way," said Heather.

When you get to keep and cherish something this precious, it can't help but alter perspective, about the people in your life and the moments without guarantee that truly matter.

"What more can anyone be thankful for than their child coming back from the brink of death and being so full of life," said Heather, a smiling Reid snuggled in her arms.

In the Burrell home there will always be a special degree of gratitude for the doctors, nurses and caregivers at Texas Children's Hospital - gifted healers who they say helped preserve for little Reid the many years to come.