Evening

Mark continues to hold onto his progress today. His intracranial pressures have remained down and his temp has been normal since yesterday. His cycles of alertness have increased in frequency and duration and although he cannot speak because of the trach, he is able to mouth some words. He is still extremely sleepy but this is not unexpected behavior considering the location of his bleed. His favorite thing now is to pucker up for a kiss. When I say reassuring things to him, he even smiles. And he winks at me! I asked him if he had a twitch and he winked again. I asked him to "do what I do" so I could test his vision, and I winked with the other eye, and he did too. I think his vision is better than the doctors had warned us.

I attended the aneurism and AVM support group annual holiday dinner tonight. I was disappointed that they didn’t have a speaker, but while we ate relatively good hospital food, people did come over to our table since we were all new faces. The best part was that I couldn’t tell the former patients from the spouses and friends!

Mark’s mother, Maggie arrived this evening in time for the 8 o’clock visit. Mark was alert the entire time.

We’re waiting out the cultures and when his bacterial infection is gone, we will be proceeding with his final steps that will get him to rehab.

There is another woman that I spend a lot of time with and her husband (the only other patient that has something similar to what Mark has) has an AVM. His is having his own ups and downs and has been in the hospital a week short of Mark. We joke that when our guys are in Bryn Mawr rehab, we’ll be recuperating at Hazeldon! We even went out to lunch today. A big step for both of us.