It's Thursday night and this afternoon we moved back into a Step Down room (remember this is where we started early last week). We have pretty much taken the full tour of the ICU now. But we're one step closer to the second floor....

Mac is slowly making improvements: He is down to the lowest amount of oxygen and he continues to do his breathing exercises like a champ! They want to slowly start weaning him from the IV blood pressure medicine and get him on an oral one - this will take days. He has been cleared to start slowly eating food as he can tolerate. He had some toast today. The fluid in his upper torso is greatly decreased; his bottom half, legs and feet are still puffy. No fever. Tuesday's EEG showed no more seizures. He still has the tube in his abdomen for draining, but the chest tube came out yesterday. We will not start physical therapy until after next Monday's MRI. But we can do little things like help him move his legs and feet around. (He is physically capable of moving limbs, it's just that he is sore in different places b/c of his drainage tubes and IV lines. Plus he's been in a bed for a long time...) He's still tired and little confused about things, but I think overall the seizure will be 'reversible'. His vision seems ok.

Those are some of the teeny tiny steps toward improvement. But he seems really sad and I know he is so over this hospital stay. Some of this can be attributed to the new medications and some of it is just reality - he's tired of feeling bad and tired of being patient! But we are trying to remind him every minute that we are moving in the right direction and he will be better soon. Once again we have nurses fighting over him because they love him and want to see him get better! The staff here is so amazing as I've mentioned before.

I'll write again soon with hopefully more tiny steps in the right direction. Thanks so much for keeping up the prayers!