Wichita ? The parents of a 2-year-old boy who nearly drowned won a temporary reprieve Wednesday in their battle to keep a Wichita hospital from pulling the plug on their son’s life support.

District Judge Timothy Lahey ordered Wesley Medical Center to provide medical care and barred doctors from removing life support until at least March 21, when he will revisit the case.

The judge also refused a request by the hospital and physicians to order – against the parents’ wishes – a brain viability study and other tests to determine whether Brett Shively Jr. is truly brain dead, as his doctors believe.

The boy has been in the hospital since he nearly drowned in the family bathtub on Feb. 4.

In issuing his ruling, Lahey called the situation tragic and said he has found no other case in law quite like it to give him guidance. The judge said the boy’s health would not be put in jeopardy by his rulings.

Brett and Yvonne Shively took the case to court after hospital officials wanted to do more tests, even against their wishes, when an electroencephalograph, or EEG, as well as magnetic resonance imaging showed no brain activity.

Neurologists and other doctors want to do more-extensive testing, such as injecting isotopes to see whether the brain is getting any blood, before they formally declare him brain dead.

“The reason we don’t want the test is their intentions for wanting the test – so they can say it is a done deal,” Yvonne Shively said after the hearing. “We refuse as parents to give up that right to say what is best for our child.”

Neither doctors nor hospital officials have directly asked the court to order removal of the life support, and the hospital is gathering home life support equipment and doing medical care procedures to send the unresponsive boy home, where his parents will care for him.

But three physicians who treated the boy testified Wednesday that indications are the boy is brain dead, showing no electrical activity whatsoever in the brain.

Asked what he would do if additional test results indicated Brett was brain dead, Dr. Lindell Smith replied: “We don’t treat dead patients, so there is no further care. If he is dead I don’t continue caring for him.”

The boy’s parents are praying for a miracle.

“I believe he is alive and I believe he will recover completely,” his mother, 26, told The Associated Press. “All we are asking for is time, the opportunity for his body to heal.”

His 25-year-old father added, “We are standing by our faith and believing God is bigger than man.”

Local publicity about the case has proved difficult for Wesley Medical Center, which has found itself gagged by patient privacy laws. The court hearing provided the first public forum for the hospital to defend itself.

The hospital’s attorney, John Gibson, told the judge that the hospital and doctors are not on different sides from the family – only have different ideas on how they should proceed.

“No one wants this to be adversarial. Everyone wants to do what is right,” said Holly Dyer, the attorney representing the doctors named in the suit.

They are trying hard to find a balance between the parents’ right and the ethical concerns of doctors about keeping a brain-dead patient on life support, she said.

But Bradley Sylvester, who represents the parents, told the court that Brett Jr. was getting the medical care he needed without the testing that his parents have refused.

“Right now there is a rush to judgment to get the test done so doctors will be free of responsibility,” he said.