A Quick Update

As soon as I picked up Brendan from kindergarten, I went into Newberg to get Mark's signature on some paperwork for a meeting I was supposed to have this afternoon. I found Mark so bad off that he couldn't even write his name. The doc decided to do a blood gas and ... sure enough! His CO2 levels were rising. Unable to stay awake for more than about 5 -10 seconds at a time (literally. I'm not exaggerating), when he was asleep, he was snorting and otherwise breathing quite noisily. Left like that, he would have gradually stopped breathing. But luckily they caught it in plenty of time to reverse it with a couple of hours on the bipap machine. But here's the rub ... Now they can't give him the narcotics or the phenergan for nausea. Once he'd had a couple of hours of solid sleep when he didn't have to struggle to breathe, he woke up with significantly better color to his skin. But ... he was very nauseous. He was throwing up bile, and was just generally extremely ill. They haven't moved him to the ICU, but they did move him to a room closer to the nurse's station so that they can keep a closer eye on him.