Dan's Family has a Caring Bridge Journal and are updating us through that. I will share them with you or you can go there and sign in yourself.
Efforts to remove the ventilator this morning were not successful, so he’s still got the tubes down his throat (not technical terminology and maybe not technically accurate, but you get the picture) to help him breathe. But unlike Wednesday and Thursday, today he’s at normal body temp and off paralytic and sedative medications, so is feeling pain. And while he’s not alert and fully aware, he is in and out of the sort of consciousness I described this morning, so he instinctively reacts to the discomfort and struggles.
Efforts are being made to find some balance between pain management and the other factors that have to be considered in helping him progress, and that seems to be an experimental process. On Saturday morning, the respiratory therapist will try once again to cut back the ventilator’s functioning fully and urge him to breathe on his own.
Our hope and prayer tonight is that he will be able to do that and provide himself with adequate oxygen so that the ventilator can be removed. While he’ll surely have residual discomfort, it should reduce his pain considerably and allow him to calm down. Heart meds are also being adjusted to support a steady rhythm (again, a layman’s effort to convey what’s going on) until his neural condition can be assessed and a defibrillator/pacemaker can be installed.
You can see – we have a ways to go, yet, even though we have reason to be encouraged. We were told ahead of time, for instance, that if he fought the ventilator, that would be a good sign. So, keep up the prayer support, please, and we’ll hope to be able to report he’s breathing on his own tomorrow.
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