And another step forward ........update to update

Doug has had a really mixed four days. Two were really not all that good, partly because of medical reasons and partly down to feeling really pissed off and despondent.
He has had most of the drug intervention points removed but, since he still has around 5 days of anti-biotics still to go, the Docs had tried to get a line in that would allow drugs to go directly to a larger vein. Unfortunately poor Doug had had so many such 'inlets' that his veins declared a go-slow and got very difficult to find.
None of this was too pleasant.
However to-day he was very much brighter. He has had his trachy tube down-sized in anticipation of a move to the Neurology HDU. This is now likely to happen on Thursday some time. I'll post as soon as we know more definitely.
From then on, the physio starts on the rehabilitation phase so I guess he'll be worked pretty hard. Mind you I know he relishes a challenge and it must be better than lying there getting frustrated.

Every day sees some little improvement and I'm sure, since we see him twice a day, we are not really appreciating the totality of it all.
I guess the most significant has been the writing since it shows that the use of language remains largely intact and this is good news for the return of speech when the combination of breathing and vocal chords recover.

Oh dear me .... I've just had another read through the blog and I realise I'd not mentioned the writing business before. So here goes with an update to the update :-)
About 3 days ago, when he was really pissed off, thrashing around in the bed and generally being pretty unresponsive, Sheena wrote on a bit of paper "Douglas, are you in pain?" and held it up in front of him. To our utter amazement, he grabbed the pen from her hand and wrote "YES !!". A little while later when he was pointing over his shoulder towards the window, he waggled his fingers and, when given the pen and paper, wrote "I want to escape .......".
You have no idea how much this means in neurological terms !! As Anna said, since he has not lost the use of language and can transmit to his hand for writing, it really means that his speech returning is much more likely - albeit over time since the other bits like tongue, mouth and throat muscles have also to recover.
He tends to pile one letter on top of another right now so when he goes fast I'm just not quick enough to catch it all but its a comin' :-)) Whoopee !!

Keep fighting Doug.
We're so proud of you.
Iain