Prayer works . . . we had a better day today. Actually, the night last night (after I posted) was good. Andrew was able to sleep and his breathing pattern changed dramatically. You see . . . the ventilator that Andrew breaths with is programmed with many settings (most I could not tell you anything about), but some I've sort of become educated on. There are settings for how much oxygen he gets, how many breaths per minute he will receive and how much volume he will get it at (that's about all I know). When something happens outside those settings, then alarms will go off that sound like a horn. Well, all night long his horn was going off because he was breathing against the ventilator. This is actually a good thing, although at first it scared me (these alarms are so stressful) because he has enough of his own volume to set the alarms off when he breaths one direction and the ventilator is pushing air in another direction (I hope I'm explaining this well). So anyways . . . last night was encouraging. This morning they gave him another test to see if he was able to come off the ventilator and he still is unable to do so, but he's doing better. If he is still unable to test well enough to come off the vent by Thursday then they will have to do a tracheotomy which is a procedure on the neck to open a direct airway through an incision in the trachea (windpipe). This will be much more comfortable for him and he will soon be able to talk with it . . . no more tube down his throat. Once he's better and doesn't require the ventilator, then it can be removed and no damage is done with exception of a small scar. But, we still have 3 days to get him off the ventilator completely. They did a scan of his lungs to make sure there is no large areas of fluid and we will have the results to that in the morning. One thing that came as a result of that test sort of happened by mistake (but turned out to be a good thing) was when he returned from the scan, he arrived at the same time 2 new CCU patients came in. This made it difficult to get him set up right away and he went over the amount of time he should have without pain meds or this medicine called Propofol. Propofol is given to most all patients that have a tube in their throat to help them relax and not constantly gag on it. They turn the amount given to him up and down all the time to sedate him and take him out of sedation for assessments, etc. Well, without this medicine the tube can be very painful and it makes the patient so aware of it that they will gag like crazy. A couple of days ago, they took Andrew down to nothing with that medicine and actually stuck a stick thing to the back of his throat and he didn't gag at all. Well, today while waiting for his medicine he starting gagging uncontrollably. It wasn't nice to watch, but we were all (including him) so happy he was doing it. So, I truly believe things are just slowly "waking up." We just need to keep praying and I know this is all going to turn out good. Andrew is in pretty good spirits tonight. He's comfortable and he's watching the Suns. Thank you all again for all your posts . . . it always brightens him up when I read them to him. We both feel so blessed to have so many friends and family members out there fighting this fight with us. We could not do this without you. God Bless you all. Joye