{Karlton Bontrager}

The crushing headache continues. Karlton describes it as one of the greatest pains he has ever experienced. The medical staff keep telling us that it is common for brain injury victims to have headaches. But this one has been continuous for two days. They give him codeine, but Karlton does not indicate any relief. We’ll [...]

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The headache continues, and Karlton still rates it high on a scale of pain, but by the end of the day we noticed that he’d made many fewer complaints about the pain than on previous days. We can only hope that it is lessening somewhat. The resident said he was hesitant to increase the codeine [...]

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Karlton suffered with a splitting headache yesterday. The medical staff increased his dosage of pain killers. Yet he did not indicate getting any relief. We wonder if this is new pain or if his body is finally transmitting to his brain some of the pain it has experienced all along. At one point he said, [...]

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For weeks Karlton lay bare-chested in the hospital bed. At times we had to put a fan on him to cool him down, but never a blanket to warm him up. Last week, however, he began to complain of being cold. He started wearing T-shirts, but he’d ask to have blankets put on him too. [...]

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Last night marked three weeks since Karlton’s accident on Friday, July 5th. What a world of progress he has made since then! At the time, there was little reason to hope that he would survive the incident. First came one neurosurgery, then another one two days later merely to save his life. A week later, [...]

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On Wednesday (7/24/2002), the doctors decided to have Karlton try breathing on his own. They put a cap on the trach, and he seemed to do pretty well. It was only then that we learned that one evening a few days previously he had pulled out the trach himself. (Sounds ghastly, doesn’t it?) It’d been [...]

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Some of the literature that we’ve been given about traumatic brain injury warns that we should expect inappropriate behavior and vulgarities. It came at us as a surprise, however, when it happened yesterday morning. One of the nurses stayed in the room to chat for a wee bit after helping to lift Karlton higher in [...]

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Many of you know already that Choy-Lang is interested in touchless healing. Ever since we arrived, she has spent hours focusing the palms of her hands on areas where Karlton’s body required the most healing energy. When he needed other kinds of care, the medical staff would also hover around him. More often than I [...]

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Karlton had another red letter day on Monday. I saw him only briefly before coming to send out my update, and I didn’t notice that the nasal-gastric tube was gone. He’d pulled it out during the night. He hated that thing so badly, plus the mitts and restraints the nurses had put on him to [...]

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