Saturday August 29

I had the opportunity to spend some time with John on Friday evening and we had a pretty poignant conversation which I found intriguing and obliged to share. John was saying how he wanted to be a good person and I told him that he is. I gave a few examples to him of things he had done in the past that amazed me and he said, "Yeah but I could have done more". I simply told him that he has plenty of time and he can make whatever changes in his life he deems necessary but the biggest thing about his statements in my opinion is that they continue to improve in terms of making sense. His brain seems to be connecting more and more dots and his thought process seems to be less linear and has more depth and meaning. I'm pretty sure that in his mind his thoughts were cognizant a while back but the fact that he is able to verbalize them in a concise and understandable way at this point is pretty miraculous. John still has times when he struggles to find the right word or tell you exactly what he is trying to say but he is patient when you ask him to repeat himself.

Over the past few days, toward the end of the day, John has had some anxiety and while we are trying to tease out the cause of it, his physician's have told us that it is normal. They have begun a couple of new medications to assist John with neurological deficit and sometimes these medications cause patients to experience a range of anxiety and some even have hallucinations. We are hopeful that this is simply another step in John's healing process and as much as we have seen changes in him, we expect even more changes in the near future. It seems from the outside looking in that his brain is being constantly bombarded by information and while this is what needs to happen in order for him to recover, it's a lot to handle. I can't empathize but it reminds me of how you might feel after being in Las Vegas for several days with the lights and sounds and overwhelming amount of information which must be processed by your brain. It is hard to sleep, and hard to relax!