Lennox Godwin

It was just a quiet evening at home not unlike any other. Colton and Jessica Godwin thought they were simply winding down after another ordinary day with their one-year-old son, Lennox. He had just had his one-year checkup and, by all accounts, was a perfectly healthy toddler. Colton was giving him a bath when everything suddenly changed.
 
“He was completely fine,” Colton remembers. “Then out of nowhere, he seized up. I didn’t realize it at the time. He threw his head back and his hands clenched up—it’s called posturing.”
 
Lennox was having seizures, completely unresponsive, and what followed were the longest moments of their lives: Lennox stopped breathing, and his parents had to give him rescue breaths while dialing 911.
 
By what they both call nothing short of divine timing, their neighbor, Tony—who happens to be a retired paramedic—and his wife, Tiffany, were home that night. “By the grace of God, the one night a week he’s home, he was there,” Jessica says. “They came over within two minutes.”
 
Lennox was rushed to the nearest hospital, where doctors stabilized him before transferring him to USA Women’s and Children’s Hospital. That first night, physicians believed Lennox might have hit his head and caused a brain bleed. A CT scan revealed bleeding in his brain, but the full picture had yet to be revealed. The next morning brought a follow-up scan showed a much more serious diagnosis: a ruptured aneurysm.
 
Doctors immediately performed an emergency procedure to place an external ventricular drain—known as an EVD—to relieve the dangerous pressure building inside his brain. But even with that lifesaving intervention, doctors knew Lennox needed more specialized care.
 
“The neurosurgeon came in and said they honestly didn’t know what to do,” Colton says. “He said they’d have to move him to Children’s of Alabama. It was extraordinarily rare. They’d never had a case like this. Even Children’s said they hadn’t seen anything like it in a one-year-old.”
 
Within hours, still intubated and on a ventilator, Lennox was placed on a plane and flown to Children's of Alabama in Birmingham and placed in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit  (PICU). “He was a pretty complicated case and had a lot going on so he stayed there in PICU most of the time,” Jessica says.
 
Even in the uncertainty, the steady communication from his care team and the PICU gave them reassurance. “Everyone in the PICU did a really good job communicating with us and managing everything going on with Lennox,” she says.
 
The next morning, the pediatric neurosurgery team attempted a delicate procedure: placing tiny coils into the aneurysm to stop the bleeding. But days later, they learned the coils hadn’t worked. The next option was something far more experimental.
 
Doctors proposed placing a specialized stent inside Lennox’s middle cerebral artery to redirect blood flow away from the aneurysm—something that had never been done in a patient his age.
“The other option was a craniotomy,” Colton says. “They would have had to go in and physically clamp the aneurysm, and that could have caused strokes.”
 
The family and doctors chose to attempt the stent—and it worked—though the healing process wasn’t immediate. The stent works gradually, redirecting blood flow away from the aneurysm so other arteries can take over circulation. 
 
For eight months, the family returned to Birmingham every three months for follow-up scans. But at that eight-month visit, the family received the news they had been longing to hear: the artery had clotted off, and the aneurysm was no longer present.
 
Now nearly four-and-a-half years old, Lennox is exactly what his parents hoped for all along: a happy, active little boy. “Developmentally he’s great,” Jessica says.
 
He recently started T-ball, loves anything with wheels or an engine, and spends his days riding his electric bike and dirt bike. He’s also fascinated by excavators and construction equipment—typical little boy interests that feel anything but ordinary to his parents.
 
Looking back, Jessica says there was a moment when everything shifted emotionally for them.
“As soon as we stepped into Children’s that night, it was like we felt this whole shift in the situation,” she says. “We knew we were where God wanted us to be.”
 
Colton agrees.
 
“When the doctor came in that night, we just felt like—okay. We’re going to get through this,” he says. “It will work out.”
 
The journey wasn’t simple. The diagnosis was confusing, the treatment path uncertain, and every step forward required trust. “It was really trial and error because it wasn’t a straightforward case,” Jessica says. “But we just had to trust.”
 
Today, that trust—and the care Lennox received at Children’s of Alabama—has given their family something they’ll never take for granted: watching a once-fragile little boy run, play, and grow.
 
A miracle named Lennox.