It's Saturday evening, Liz and I just got back from the hospital, we were there from like 12:30 to 5, Dad and Marty were up there for the morning shift. Then Mom and our cousin Jessica are there now. This morning while my Dad was there he said the EEG was spiking quite a bit and Andrew was breathing over the ventilator. His breaths were in the 20-21 area, which is really really good. Last night the highest it went was 13, they have him set on 10 breaths a minute, when Liz and I first got there today he was on 8 breaths a minute. They adjusted Andrews positioning and checked his stats and after that, he quit breathing on his own completely, the vent was doing all the work. I was sitting next to him rubbing his hand talking to him while Liz watched the EEG monitors and they would spike when i talked to him, and when Liz was talking to him when i was watching the screen, so we think he can hear us. The nurses all talk to him too and explain what they are doing. One of the signs that he is waking up is when they suction his breathing tube, he will start to cough eventually. He is not coughing yet at all when they suction him so far.

The doctors have also started to reduce the medication that is speeding up his heart rate and blood pressure through the central line as he starts to wake up. He is still on all seizure medications and Dobutamine. They were able to increase his calorie intake, they are giving him more through his feeding tube. He is still restrained to the bed because we don't want to take the chance of him waking up and pulling his tubes out. They have the restraints pretty loose and he does look comfortable minus all the shit taped to him and tubes going in and out of him. Today his nurse, Casey was changing his position and flipping him every 2 hours, she did have one other patient besides Andrew today, so i don't know if they think hes more stable then before or if they are short handed. The resident doctor came in and chatted with Liz and I for quite awhile trying to answer all our questions. He said the coma meds, Pentobarb and Versed are still in his system. Those meds have a half life of 30-50 hours. Andrew was taken off them about 30 hours ago so they are still about 40-50% still in his system. It could take until they are almost out of his system for him to wake up, they said every patient is different and every ones metabolism is different. He did say Andrew is looking better today than yesterday. They said the spikes on the EEG and him showing us he could breathe over the vent was a huge step in this long process. We were a little concerned he hasn't tried to breathe over the vent at all while we were there, so hopefully he will start to do that again when mom is there tonight. The doctor said if he isn't awake by Monday or Tuesday they will start to worry.

We need Andrew to wake up very soon, and hope his seizure activity has completely stopped or they will have to put him back in coma. The longer he is on the meds to induce coma the less chance of him waking up. Hopefully he will wake up tonight or tomorrow and be able to breathe on his own, they still are not able to tell us how much more damage this seizure has caused on top of the stroke damage. He was seizing uncontrollably for about 18 hours. They did give him the max on the coma meds as well so it could take until Monday or Tuesday for him to wake up, however we are hoping for sooner. We hope he is able to come off the vent as soon as possible after he wakes up and hopefully they will be able to do the G tube instead of the feeding tube. They did say they will do another swallow test after he wakes up, but before this all happened he was refusing to eat his pureed diet.

On that note, please continue to pray for my brother. I will update more tonight or tomorrow.