...Well that is maybe going to be even more impossible to guess than whether he's too hot or too cold or thirsty or nauseated or something! 

"Um. Khemeth, do you have any...?" 

Khemeth had been staring at his brother, his ability to read his brother's emotional cues and keep mental Kalorm in sync with actual Kalorm apparently very thrown off by the number of additional things going on. 

But with that particular prompt: you're Kalorm, you just woke up confused and feeling terrible, and learned there was a boat accident bad enough that you were evacuated to Default, and you're groggy and out of it but still have an immediate followup question -

- put like that it's very obvious, and he would have put it in his immediate reassurance script, except that one, Kalorm may in fact still be too drugged to be forming memories right now and Khemeth did not super want to have to tell him six times, and two, the answer on "are his friends okay" is...not all of them. 

He doesn't hesitate, though. 

"You handled it incredibly well and kept everyone alive and calm for forty-five minutes while help was en route. Your friend Dallim...didn't make it. I'm sorry. The others are all going to be fine. They're on a cargo ship near the site of the accident." 

Oh no. This is so upsetting!!!

...How is Kalorm taking it. 

He looks pretty crushed! A little calmer, though, there's relief there as well. It must have been even worse, not knowing one way or another. 

"Is there anything else you urgently want to know?" Khemeth says, quietly, seriously. "The boat's wrecked. You've been here for a little less than two days. I'm not thinking of anything obvious." 

Well. There are lots of things he wants to say.

You more-likely-than-not have permanent brain damage. The version of you in my head keeps telling the version of Merrin in my head boat facts. Dad managed to be about 40% less rude and offensive than my median estimate. I don't know if the you in my head is the same as the you that's going to exist now. Merrin gets upset if you tell her she's good at things. We tried so hard to save you but I think maybe we started trying twenty-five years too late. 

But it seems pretty pointless to say when Kalorm is this foggy, and maybe just period. 

Kalorm's eyes are struggling to focus on Khemeth and it's not clear if he was tracking any of that. 

"You're going to be pretty groggy from the anesthetic for a few hours," Merrin says. (And hopefully it's mostly just that.) "You don't need to try to stay awake the whole time." 

"And I for one think it would be a lot more logistically straightforward to continue this conversation once you can participate in it," Khemeth says dryly. "For now, I really wanted to hear the rest of Merrin's story that you so rudely interrupted by deciding to rejoin the world of the conscious." 

Tired eye-roll, but Khemeth apparently judged the tone right, because rather than try to argue about it via eyebrow wiggles alone, Kalorm closes his eyes. 

About thirty seconds later the EEG reading thinks that he's back in light sleep. 

Time to actually review the last five minutes of sensor data! And see if markets have updated or if Treatment Planning has anything new to add. 

His EEG while awake was mildly abnormal, but it's hard to pick apart 'signs of damage' from 'signs that he's exhausted and on a lot of drugs.' Likewise it's hard to distinguish a potential sensory processing or receptive language deficit from Kalorm just being temporarily out of it due to all the drugs. Same with the generalized weakness and poor coordination. Merrin didn't flag any spasticity or altered reflexes, but the painkillers have muscle-relaxant effects. No seizures yet, but the sedatives have anticonvulsant effects too; the period of greatest risk will actually be once those drugs are fully out of his system. He wasn't really lucid enough to answer questions about subjective symptoms like headache or visual loss, but that isn't in itself strong evidence of damage either, since almost no one would be this soon after spending 24 hours on a shockingly high dose of strong anesthetics. 

Basically, it's hard to make any significant update one way or another. 

It's unclear if he remembers the accident, or just made a correct inference, but either way it's a good sign that he could make that inference, form an intention to get information on it, and (eventually) successfully communicate it. This is more the absence of unexpectedly bad news than particularly surprising good news, but it shows that very basic reasoning and goal-oriented behavior is mostly intact. It earns them a 5% drop to 60% odds of permanent deficits, and pretty much entirely rules out moderate-or-worse damage. 

They're looking at local-nerve-block options for pain control, because it seems pretty clear that they won't be able to get him off the ventilator while he's on as many systemic painkillers as he is right now, and if they try to just cut the dose, then breathing and coughing are going to hurt and he likely won't manage to clear his still-copious lung secretions. 

They would like Merrin to stop the IV sedation fully at this point, and preemptively give a dose of a longer-acting drug that should help keep him calm but not quite so drowsy. Also, he responded really well to short-acting beta blockers, and seemed less agitated once his heart rate was more under control, which fits with the cause being more anxiety than pain per se. Given the concern about painkiller side effects, they would actually like Merrin to start using the beta blockers as a first-line response if his heart rate or blood pressure are spiking and it seems plausible he's more agitated or panicky than actually in pain. 

Kalorm sleeps for a while; once the sedation has had another hour to metabolize, his sleep pattern starts to normalize further, moving between recognizable sleep stages and spending a LOT of time in REM sleep. (Prolonged deep anesthesia actually causes a REM sleep deficit.) 

Khemeth will keep his brain from eating itself with uncertainty by asking to hear more of Merrin's sim stories. They are mostly not as intense as the cave one but she has so many stories. 

Merrin is going to have to gently and very apologetically wake Kalorm every half-hour or so, both to make sure there hasn't been any unexplained neurological deterioration, and because that's about how long she can stretch it before his oxygenation starts getting worse and he really badly needs his lungs vacuumed again. 

...Nerdel is happy to do the waking-him part, since Kalorm is predictably going to be increasingly cranky about it and it's maybe better if he isn't aiming all of that at Merrin? 

Kalorm is still too drowsy to be annoyed for long the first few times. He glares at them, makes affronted faces about being asked again to squeeze his mother's hand or make a fist which he definitely thinks is VERY STUPID, and is pretty miserable about having his lungs suctioned but doesn't seem to have the energy to actually fight it. It's enough of an exhausting ordeal each time that he almost immediately goes back to sleep. 

...By around midnight, he's on a 30% lower overall dose of systemic painkillers, thanks to a strategically placed nerve block on his broken arm, an even-more-carefully-placed block that should at least partially numb the bypass incision site without accidentally affecting his heart or lungs, plus a lot of absorbed-through-the-skin local anesthetic cream on other painful areas.

He apparently has the energy to start trying to complain. 

Khemeth is being incredibly patient with this, given that the subvocalization microphone is parsing at best one word in three, Kalorm vehemently shakes his head at the prospect of having a lipreading expert called in, he is still struggling with either strength or coordination enough to make pointing at pictures on his picture board difficult, and he does not really have the patience to hold still for gaze tracking. 

Mostly Kalorm would like them to know that he feels really terrible! He's really dizzy and his head hurts, and he's thirsty, and cold, and ITCHY, and his feet feel [some adjective that they never manage to figure out or guess], and he has a stomachache, and he is really dubious about Khemeth and Merrin's repeated reassurance that his boat accident did not involve getting stabbed in the chest because it EXTREMELY FEELS like it. Also the breathing tube tastes bad. (This is by far not his only complaint about it but it's the one that Merrin has not already repeatedly preemptively apologized for.) 

(It is sort of reassuring, actually, to see Kalorm finally acting like himself, even if "acting like himself" means "being very frustrating.") 

Merrin is fully in agreement on that, actually! He's giving her so much data on his neurological status and she doesn't even have to feel like she's the one being super rude.

(Also, wow, she needs more caffeine if all night is going to be like this.) 

Observations Merrin will be able to make: Kalorm, despite being a lot more awake, is definitely having trouble following anything at a normal speaking speed. (She keeps having to remind Khemeth or Nerdel to slow down, use simpler sentences, and repeat themselves more.) It seems likely that some of his intense frustration with the picture board is because Khemeth put like fifty pictures on it and this is overwhelming. He can handle simple instructions if provided one step at a time, but his family definitely has an engrained habit of talking amongst themselves using sentences with way too many clauses and too much overall grammatical complexity for current!Kalorm to follow. He doesn't obviously have language-specific processing issues; it's more that he needs things to happen fairly slowly, and only one thing at a time. 

He's definitely easily frustrated, but - as far as Merrin can tell, a pretty understandable degree of frustrated? It's just objectively a frustrating situation. He doesn't seem especially ongoingly disoriented about the situation. Merrin has of course been repeating the basics every time he wakes up, on the basis that the sedative drugs interfere with memory formation, but at this point he seems unconfused about the fact that he's in a hospital after having been seriously injured in a boating accident. 

(And they haven't needed to re-explain about his friends, even though he was still incredibly out of it at the point when he first asked.) 

This overall seems like a good sign? Though he won't stop mouthing words and then inevitably coughing, and while it may be great for clearing his secretions - and it's overall good that his pain control is clearly working well enough that this isn't agonizing torture for him - it's not actually ideal for his oxygenation, and Merrin is a little bit concerned that he'll manage to do more damage to his injured ribs or possibly even something bad to his chest incision. 

...Though it turns out to be really hard to get and then hold his attention. 

"Kalorm. Kalorm." No, he's still not focusing on her and is trying to communicate something to Khemeth which is coming out way too garbled on the throat microphone to parse and which Khemeth is apparently not succeeding at guessing. She's going to have to raise her voice. "KALORM can you please STOP and LISTEN to me!" 

Affronted look, but he does stop trying to mouth words and clumsily gesture with his working hand. 

Merrin bumps up the oxygen concentration on the ventilator and increases the inspiratory pressure support by a couple of points, because Kalorm's O2 saturation is still in the 80s and he's visibly out of breath. 

"That's it. That's better. You're probably going to feel less dizzy if you focus on slow deep breaths for a minute. Okay?"