Update 34

At the moment Thaddeus is doing better than the Brewers. About an hour ago the doctors decided to turn off the sedative completely. This allowed Thaddeus to wake up enough for them to take the breathing tube out. He is still on a pretty high level of oxygen but it is just though the regular nose tubes that he has had for three months anyhow, not a breathing machine. After they got the tube out they put him back on the sedative. I was able to keep him relatively calm until with the help of the sedative he fell asleep. There is no guarantee that he won't need the breathing tube back in, but as of right now things sounded good when they listened to his breathing. The real test will come over night as we monitor his numbers. We will see if his system can handle the workload without the breathing machine. If that goes well, they will work on getting him back to his regular meds. They have decided to give him another round of steroids to see if they can't get the inflammation in his airway down even further. His CVP numbers have been high since he got back from surgery. These are the numbers that measure the pressure in the vessels in the part of his system that they just redirected. One of the nurses is hypothesizing that the numbers may not be totally accurate because of some 'extraneous' tubing that was added into the sensing system. She has removed this piece and we will see if the numbers change. They also have him on a diuretic to help keep fluids draining. That can help the heart and lungs not to have to work so hard. Long time readers will remember that pee is a big deal here.

We are told that we won't have to do the day by day monitoring of all his stats but he may or may not be on oxygen for a while. I am not sure what the medication regime will be like, but I am fairly sure that he will at least be on aspirin, and maybe one other. We will find out about that when it is closer to time to go home.