Monday 4th May

Darryl was fairly on the move today with another MRI scan and later this afternoon he was hoisted out of his bed and put in a lazy boy chair where he sat more upright.

Yesterday he had a chest X-Ray and a CT scan to rule out any potential issues as they seem to think he is not progressing as he should given his initial positive repsonses to commands.

In any event the scans didn’t show up anything alarming  as far as I have been able to find out, although he still has quite a bad chest infection which they are working hard to resolve before it develops into something worse.  I haven’t got the results of the MRI as yet so don’t know what’s happening there.  HDU is quite a lot less intensive than in the critical care ward where it is one to one.  There are two nurses to a maximum of five patients and it takes a little bit of adjusting from a parents point of view.

So in all today there has been no real progress although to me he does look more alert – if you can be alert in a coma.  He seems restful and his body looks fine so I hope his brain is also repairing while he’s off in ‘lala’ land.

Brenna read him another story tonight and she seems to be coping very well considering.  I have been fending off the media all day who have picked up on the preventable head injury line.

The amusing if not tragically sad aspect of today was seeing Darryl sitting there motionless in an armchair with bloody rugby head gear on!   They actually fitted him with head gear to protect his skull which has a large piece of bone missing .  It seems so sadly ironic that the last time he had rugby head gear on was when he collapsed into a coma on the sideline having worn it to ‘protect’ his head on the rugby field.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry.  At the moment the crying seems to be the automatic reposonse.

Please share the link to this site with others who may be interested to keep up to date on Darryl.

Thanks again all.

Mike