Steady improvement

Ryan's been breathing well on his own since yesterday (on a ventilator setting that only provides continuous positive airway pressure -CPAP-). Everyone's really pleased with his current rate of breathing & oxygen saturation, so the doctors are going to be monitoring him & are thinking that they will try & extubate him again tomorrow. It's also probable that they'll switch his sedative from Propofol to Precedex, which will allow him to be kept more alert but with less agitation.

The cultures that were taken from his lungs aren't showing much growth yet, but based on his chest x-rays they do think that he has pneumonia, so they're keeping him on his IV antibiotics.

His red blood cells were down a little, so they gave him a unit of blood overnight. Amazingly, this was the first & only blood he has had to receive so far.

So, everything is looking good. They're currently keeping him comfortably sedated - they won't start backing him off of his sedative until closer to when they plan to extubate. I'll give an update tomorrow to let you all know how everything went.