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

[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 seems to be okay, and if he has some neurological deficits later, I'm crossing my fingers that they're as minor as possible.

[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.