Evening Requests (P.S. 15 Minutes Later)

Just spoke with MA again and she has two concerns and prayer requests.

First, TJ says that he can't take being intubated much longer, so he/we again ask for prayer that he is successfully extubated today. For better or for worse my mom has noticed that the Thai medical staff are more "stingy" with pain meds than the U.S. tends to be.

Again, imagine having a garden hose going down your airway for a week. Every time you move you feel a gag reflex starting to kick in and have to hold it back as best you can. And it is constantly up against your throat.

While this is MA's analogy I've seen what it looks like and have no doubt this is accurate. It was obvious that TJ was having trouble taking it a year ago when he was so far out of it it took over a week for him to completely recover from his coma. It really is bad.

Second, the hospital staffing appears to be under some duress. We don't know why, MA is just noticing that for the first time the attentiveness to TJ is dropping, dropping to an uncomfortable point (if not life-threatening etc., less than we would expect in the U.S.). So you can pray that whatever is causing this (perhaps something as simple as the hospital gaining more patients than they expected in a 24 hour period) that this is resolved.

And, honestly, the staffing thing applies to everyone in the hospital. If TJ (in serious, if not critical condition) does not have adequate nursing staffing, then it is a good bet that very few -- if anybody -- else in the hospital does.

Again, thank you all for your prayers! We are seeing God listen to them in a more tangible way than the vast majority of people do in a lifetime. Please, keep it up!

P.S. To clarify a previous post, it is not clear whether TJ has MRSA or not. This is another major area of concern; we need an answer to prayer as to finding out what the underlying infection is. A sky-high WBC of 28k means there was a bacterial infection (viruses won't shoot up the WBC). And we need to know what it was/is.

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