Friday, December 18, 2009

Waiting Game

No news yet from the neurologist - we're still waiting to hear the results of his CT scan and EEG.

The cardiologist is "very, very pleased" with his heart rate and blood pressure stats.

We are continually reminded by nurses and doctors that dad had a very serious, very massive heart attack and that he is still "a very, very sick man" (duh).

He was quite agitated this morning, really squirming, coughing, grimacing and thrashing around. Still not following commands though, so they can't extubate him. So they put him back on full ventilator support and reintroduced some sedation, just to give his heart a rest. They'll try to back those things off again later, and see how he tolerates it.

I told our nurse that I was really concerned about the lack of consciousness/interaction/response/whateveryouwanttocallit, and it was explained to me that, due to the severity of what happened to him, it could possibly take a month or more for him to really start responding and interacting with us, but even given that he could eventually recover full cognitive function. (The nurse mentioned possible hypoxic brain injury, but said people can and do recover from that.) It's exhausting to think that it could take that long, but it gives me some more hope than I had yesterday, when I was feeling really concerned about his lack of with-it-ness.

More later...

No comments:

Post a Comment