Linda is still off the ventilator, and they will move her into a smaller trach today or tomorrow. This is good news because this means that soon she will be able to eat and (trumpet fanfare) TALK!!!!
The hospital has a couple of boards she can use, one has a series of useful phrases she can point to, and the other has the alphabet, kind of like a ouija board only it's for brain injured people instead of dead people :-/ She doesn't like them, though, and waves them away preferring to write us notes, and mouth words and do some pretty talented pantomime. If there is a World Series of Charades, I'm putting my money on Linda, because she can get just about any idea across just by acting it out, it's pretty fascinating to watch!
Even so, I'm sure she'll be glad to put her inner mime back in the invisible box and resume regular speech with people. Hopefully that will be really soon, because she gets frustrated when we don't understand what she's trying to say, in spite of her talent. :-( It would bug me too, so I really try, but some concepts are just too complicated.
Today she is also off of the painkiller they've had her on, and her memory does seem to be improving. Also, she seems less agitated, which I was noticing really seemed to go hand in hand with the painkiller.
As she asked the nurses questions, the information seemed to "stick" better today. One of the nurses told her that she'd be in the hospital for 21 days at least, because that's the risk period for the vasospasms. That really stuck in her head, and later when her minister came by for a visit, she indicated it to him. That was AWESOME to see, because I feel like we're starting get a handle on where Linda is actually at in her head, without all the medications messing her up. I imagine we'll get an even better picture when she starts talking.
She's having a few issues with her day/night cycle. The nurse says that's really common, and they'll probably start giving her medication to help her keep them straight. Hopefully it will not affect her like the other meds did. They say that at night she agitated and wound up and doing odd things that aren't like her during the day, and that this is pretty normal for neurosurgery patients in the ICU for as long as she has been and will be. That can't be easy to deal with for her, and I hope that as she can do more things for herself this will alleviate some of the stress she's experiencing, right now she's pretty powerless.
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I want to thank Linda's family for this blog. All of us who have worked with and care about Linda really appreciate being able to come here and get an update on her condition. It's great to see her progess.
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