my uncle

[drucat]

My mom's brother woke up, recognized people, and was able to respond to whatever basic commands the doctor gave him, so now it's just going to be a question of how long his brain was without oxygen. Still scary, but much much better than it sounded two days ago.

Comments

[skydiamonde]

Yay! Glad he came out of it and things should be fine.

How does the brain lacking oxygen thing work? I just tried looking it up and it said comas are just brains not getting enough oxygen, but then how are people in comas for years and years and then come out of it fine? I guess I never really knew what a coma is.

[drucat]

Well, he was in an induced coma (I didn't know from what my cousin said the first time I talked to anyone), which is much much better than just being in a coma and basically means they were keeping him asleep - in this case, they also lowered his body temperature, because he was having small seizures, and I guess they couldn't stop them any other way. His vitals were really good but it got scary because when they did whatever they did to have him come out of it, he didn't wake up (until this morning afaik). As far as the brain thing, basically, when you're brain's not getting oxygen, it sends a signals to the neurons that basically tells them to die off - it's a whole complicated thing actually - so it can result in brain damage, but then you have to figure out how much and where and stuff. They did an MRI on my uncle to try to figure out why he wasn't waking up yesterday, and there was some discoloration, which sounds bad, but I don't know how much or what parts of his brain - right now it's just good that the really major stuff

[skydiamonde]

Well supposedly we only use a small part of our brain, so it might even be some part we don't use.

[drucat]

Sadly that is not actually true. We pretty much use the whole thing.

dayly since lesson... umm

[ggnoma]

comas can be caused by lack of oxigne but also by other alemtnes.. ie head troma or fever
the lak of oxign come more form the hart attac iself b/c the hart is not beeting so not putshig the oxignated blode into the brain hence causing the potental brain dammge -- putting somone in an induced coma and chilling them often reduces the brain dammage b/c it reduces the amount of ozxigne needed and the speed of the chemicla reations the kill off cells
the nice thing is that we were also very wrogn about nerun regneration and after brain inger/ dammange peol do generate new neronal connetions so if say the part of his brain that knew how to walk was dammaged he will most probably be able to re lern
glad he wolk up and reccgnised peoopl that is a good sight

Re: dayly since lesson... umm

[drucat]

Yeah - exactly. They're thinking he was probably only without oxygen for maybe two minutes, so that is hopeful.