Well, it has been 9 days since Dave has been on a ventilator. We have had up days and down days. Some days he is awake enough to write things down and then there are days that he is completely sedated.

A couple of days ago Dave was put on heavier sedatives because he has high anxiety with the ventilator in his throat so they had to change him to assist mode (the highest mode) on the ventilator. They said they were going to move him back and forth from assist to pressure support, but haven’t because he has been sleeping so much. It seems that during the day he does better, but in the early morning he gets worse.

The other night I came back to the hospital to visit and he had a heart rate of 200. They gave his some medicine to stop his heart for a few seconds and see if it would lower his heart rate. It didn’t work as well as they would have liked. We mainly think it is because Dave doesn’t like all the doctors and commotion they make when they come in, so we have his visitation with the doctors and residents as low impact as possible. The doctors have also agreed to let us spend some more time with him. Someone has spent the night with him for the last couple of nights.
The pulmonary doctors are going to check in with infectious disease to see if Dave has fungus inside him. I think the pulmonary doctors want them to be more aggressive and look into that more. Also they are talking about putting in a trec on Friday or Monday if there are no big improvements with Dave. His lungs are getting slightly better and they think he is taking steps to improvement. We did find out today that Dave has an infection in his blood and they are moving his IV line to his neck. Just another one of those infections people get from being in the hospital and the toll it takes on your body. I will keep you update as we progress.

As always keep us in your prayers and thank you so much for all the ones you have said. I know God has blessed us with some very thoughtful and caring friends and family. I know that He will see Dave through this struggle. We just have to keep fighting along with Dave and keep the faith that God will bring his healing hands on him.