evening monday

Tuesday/August/2008 02:42 AM Barrie`s BlogBarrie`s Blog
We arrived in Tours yesterday in time for me to make the evening visit. Yesterday evening's and both of today's visits were so wonderfully  encouraging and seemed, thankfully, to really mark a significant turning point since this unimaginably awful ordeal began for Dad.  As soon as I went in to his room I could see Dad was fully awake and alert - far more than we've seen him on any other previous visits. It was clear he was happy and surprised to see me and even managed to try to smile despite having the ventillator tube in his mouth. It was so incredibly heartening to see and overwhelmingly moving. Dad is doing really well with steady progress. He is breathing by himself now but does still need the ventillator but this is largely due to still needing to be on dialysis. In the next day or so the doctors will start him on some medication which may help him to come off the dialysis. Dad was able to communicate with me that he had a few discomforts which I was able to relay to the nurses and they remedied for him. By the end of today's visit, Dad and I resolved to communicate with a pen and me calling out the alphabet with Dad responding to letters to literally spell out what he wanted to say. I can't describe how good it felt to have a two way line of communication open, albeit in a rather primative way!

The doctor also said an x-ray taken today of Dad's lungs showed they were very good now and the hospital said they were very happy with Dad's progress. All very, very, encouraging. Can't wait for tomorrow's  visit!