Early Evening

Mark has a wonderful new doctor (resident), whose name I don't want to misspell, so it’ll have to wait for another time, but he actually came over to Dick and me this afternoon to give us an update.

Mark is stable medically. They removed him from the EEG machine since there was no evidence of seizure activity. His spinal fluid came back negative for infection or traces of blood, and so did his blood tests. As I said before, his CAT scan was also normal and his intracranial pressures were good.

So, why is he asleep and unresponsive? The area of the brain where Mark had the bleeding is the brain stem, which regulates your basic body functions, like temperature and sleep/wake cycles. When Mark first woke up about one week ago, he seemed to go from almost always asleep to almost always awake. The resident thinks he’s in a “sleep cycle” now.

You probably remember me talking about Mark having fevers on and off, although he had no infection? Well, he hasn’t had a fever in days, so maybe he’s overcome the problems regulating his body temp. Hopefully, he’ll be able to regulate his sleep wake cycles too.