Saturday, August 21, 2010

Her eyelids fluttered!

*This post is an update in a series of posts on my friend Amber, who is currently in the hospital. You can read the earlier posts here.

**Also, the family has set up a blog to keep friends and family abreast of what's going on and also to help reduce the feeling of obligation to update everyone individually. Most of the posts will be duplicates of my posts on this blog, since the family has asked me to update the blog for them.


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The doctors are attempting to wake Amber up again this weekend, and this morning her eyelids fluttered and she has coughed! This means she is waking up. Keep praying that this will continue to go smoothly!

I can hardly control myself right now. You guys, her eyelids fluttered! And she coughed.

Yesterday, they had her down to a Level 2 of the pentobarbital (the coma-inducing medication), which has been allowing a lot more brain activity. They are trying to keep her calm and trying to gradually pull her out again. The doctors allowed JP to put some headphones in her ears with classical music playing quietly to assist in keeping her calm.

This morning the nurse said her brain is even more active than yesterday, but they didn't say that they were seizures necessarily. Hopefully, they'll be able to take her down to a Level 1 this morning and .5 by tonight. Then completely off tomorrow.

Sorry for the delay in updates. As we've mentioned before, this is a process, and sometimes there isn't a lot of new news.

Amber has been successful at keeping the temperature away. The coma-inducing medication can be pretty harsh, and sometimes it seems that you're treating the symptoms of the treatment and not the symptoms of the true cause. But yesterday and today were looking better.

Again, all of the scans she keeps having of different areas of her body and different organs, continue to come back favorable. She looks good. This is positive, but they feel that waking her up from this coma will allow them to focus on any problems, if any, that they aren't able to see while she's sleeping.

To aid in bringing her out without seizures, they are going to use an anti-convulsion medication. Hopefully, that works well. They just want to wake her up and take her body off the pentobarbital because of the sometimes uncomfortable side effects. They feel if they can control the seizures and get her to wake up, that this would be best for her right now. The neurologist/EEG specialist will be watching her closely. If things get too intense, I'm sure they will put her back under and start the process again. Let's pray that we don't have to do that this time.

Please keep your prayers coming. Thank you so much! I'll keep you updated.
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