Evening

Wow, if I only knew it'd be so easy, I would have had Alan stop by sooner! When Mark heard Alan's voice he opened his eyes, lifted his arm and motioned him over to the bed. With his eyes wide open he hung on Alan's every word. He even mouthed a few of his own, but that'll just have to stay between the two of them.

After Alan and Deb left, Mark stayed awake for over an hour, the MOST aware and awake I've seen him yet. He even lifted his arm and put it on mine and squeezed it. He even seemed a little leery of what was going on around him.

Oh, and his ventilator has been on "assist" today and Mark has been initiating all his own breathing.

Can't get much better than that. I'll have a meeting with his physician on Monday and get an idea of his next step.

I printed out some comments from the blog and read them to him but he fell asleep. Please don't take offence, I'm sure it was the delivery.

And you're not gonna believe this, but we needed Mark to sign a form for us, and hoping to get him to mark an X on the paper, we gingerly placed a pen in his right hand, put the pen to paper and without even looking, Mark WROTE his name on the damn paper, a perfect signature exactly like the one on his drivers license.

Go figure. I think he's ready to get out of there.