The path to waking

I'm actually writing this after a night of flying from my regular airport. I'm pretty tired but I wanted to post about what the status was when I left on Monday night. The good news is that the C.T. scanned no evidence of a recent stroke. Apparently there was evidence of an old one, but since dad has never been hospitalized for one before it must have been small. But, whatever has happened in the past, this is not the reason he is not waking up. The other good news is that it appears his right ventricle is performing better and better. Whereas previously the surgeon acted as though the removal of the RVAD would be extremely serious, and very probably life-threatening, he now thinks that will not be such a big deal and would even be willing to move up the removal date. Though still he was willing to schedule it so that we could be there if that's what we wanted. Likewise dialysis continues to do its thing. Last BUN number I heard was in the 50's. The kidney specialist thought that his numbers might come down into the 20's as soon as today (Tuesday). He thought they might then take him off dialysis and see if his kidney's could now handle the slack, since they would not be overwhelmed with the crap from the surgery. But the big remaining problem is of course dad's inability to wake up. The surgeon doesn't quite understand it and is not completely convinced that the kidney problem explains it. Still he doesn't have a better theory at this point and so he's willing to go along with it. His real fear is that dad has significant neurological problems. But why that would be the case, no one is particularly clear. They think there was a significant loss of blood pressure at some point, but honestly they could not tell me when. And then there seemed to subtle signs of increased responsiveness. When the nurses were washing out his mouth, he seem to express some pleasure and bit down on the stick with the sponge. Since one of the things that people who have had the VAD surgery report is extremely dry mouth, that follows. And such would exceed automatic responses. So we continue to see if the dialysis will result in his waking up. They will probably do an EEG in the next couple of days when they feel like they can.