Chris here, giving feature columnist Hannah a little break after so many days reporting on Steffan’s progress.  Saturday was a relatively uneventful day, but the changes that did happen are all in the right direction.  Steffan is off the paralytic that was helping to keep his intracranial pressure (ICP) down, and it’s been holding at 9 all day.  Danger zone is 20+, so this is great news.  Tests have shown some bacteria in his lungs – maybe the result of being on a ventilator for a prolonged period of time - but he’s on two antibiotics now to combat that.   At the same time, they also felt comfortable reducing the percent of oxygen they are delivering to him through the ventilator.  Normal air that we all breathe has 21% oxygen.  Yesterday, he was getting 60% oxygen, but it was reduced to 40% today, which means they feel more comfortable with how his lungs are distributing oxygen to his body. 

As far as we know, we are still on track for surgery on Monday to clip the arterial bulge that showed up in the most recent angiogram.  It’s TINY – 1.5 mm on an artery behind his right eye.  It’s crazy to think that all of this was the result of such a small anomaly, but we hope that the surgery continues Steffan on his journey of recovery.