Friday, June 5

John was stable throughout the night and his heart is working all by itself and has been for quite some time. He was removed from the ventilator to see how he would respond and he was able to breathe on his own for over an hour. His pulmonologist was encouraged by this but reluctant to remove his intibation tube so that they wouldn’t have to reinsert this tube later. They also want to keep him on the ventilator to give his brain a chance to relax a bit and not work so hard. Essentially, the ventilator takes the pressure off of his body to give it a chance to recuperate. The neurologist has not seen much change in John’s brain activity at this point. We are hopeful that in the next few days that will change. Also, when John gets more stable and can be moved, further brain testing can be done…at this point it would be dangerous and unnecessary to compromise his medical stability to test this. John was given dialysis again today in an effort to help his kidneys and keep his body from having to work overtime.

What we know now…

At this point, John is on a variety of medications to help with fever, blood pressure and simply recover from all he has been through. He has IV lines in both hands, is on a ventilator, has IV lines in his femoral arteries and a port in his jugular vein for dialysis purposes. It is difficult to see him with all these tubes but we believe that he is getting amazing care and the physicians, nurses and other staff have been amazing at responding to all of our questions and needs and more importantly they have provided care second to none to John. He has a nurse in his room at all times and there are many specialists including a nephrologist, an infectious disease physician, neurologist, cardiologist, and pulmonologist to name a few.

We remain vigilant in our hope that John will recover fully however our thoughts are tempered with the thoughts of the road ahead. John is still in extremely critical condition. His body has withstood a tremendous amount of stress and no one knows for sure what the result of that will be. What we do know is that he has touched so many lives and there are lots of people praying for him and words simply cannot do justice to the base of support and love we have received.