Lynn has been tolerating his capped trach extremely well. We have not had to uncap it since it was capped. So hopefully in a few more days we will be able to talk about taking the trach out. Now we have a new development. Lynn has started "storming". For those of you who don't know what "storming" is, it is a autonomic sympathetic nervous system response which is commonly known as the "fight or flight" response. The hypothalmus of Lynn's brain is sending signals that set off this response. It causes increased heartrate, increased blood pressure, increased respiratory rate and often agitation. While this is not considered "normal" in most people, the neurologist said that they see it in almost all brain injuries. Now if you ask the neurologist, she will tell you that it doesn't really mean anything good or bad. If you ask the nurses at South Davis, they say that it is a good thing and they see it as one of the stages of waking up. Some people will progress through the "storming" stage and go onto the next stage. Some people never progress past the "storming" stage and can even regress back to a previous stage. So we still don't really know what it means for Lynn, other than it's a change which I consider a good thing. Unfortunately, it is difficult to watch Lynn in this state because he becomes very tense, breathes fast and appears agitated. We have started him on Propanolol which helps decrease the symptoms. His blood pressure and heartrate were getting pretty high and the Propanolol helps. After almost two days of "storming", he was very tired once we got the symptoms under control so he has been sleeping most of the day. You can still see that he is "storming", but he doesn't seem as distressed. I was worried that the stress of "storming" would affect his OTC deficiency and cause problems so I e-mailed Nicola Longo who is the Metabolic Geneticist who has been overseeing Lynn's treatment for OTC deficiency and asked him about it. He said that it shouldn't affect the OTC but that Propanolol was alright to give. Hopefully tonight Lynn will get some rest since he didn't get much last night. On Tuesday, Lynn has an appointment with his Neurologists at the University. It will be interesting to see what they have to say. I will try to keep you more updated. It looks like Lynn and I will be spending both of our birthdays in the hospital!