Awesome! Challenge accepted!

Merrin is, indeed, expecting that it will take some doing to get Kalorm properly motivated to do annoying rehab exercises from his bed. He's probably going to think most of the proposed exercises are stupid. Maybe she can come up with modifications that he won't think are stupid? 

She thinks she can get him pretty motivated by the promise of being able to stand up, though. He clearly really hates feeling trapped here. 

(...This is not a standard rehab exercise but, like, possibly they should encourage him to try scooting or crawling on the floor before he's actually able to walk? Merrin's prediction is that Kalorm will glower at her SO HARD but will basically agree that a lot of what he wants is 'the theoretical capability to move himself from point A to point B', and crawling is undignified but still accomplishes that? 

- this is a weird and embarrassing note to add on Kalorm's chart, but it would be awful to give Kalorm less than the best care just because she can't handle social awkwardness. Merrin grits her teeth, and makes the note.) 

How about the other outcome predictions? 

For Kalorm being ready to come off the ventilator: 26 hours / 40 hours / 4 days. (Again, the lower end assumes that Kalorm won't actually be quite ready to breathe fully unassisted, but will be alert enough to make his preferences firmly known, and will prefer the obtrusive facemask for noninvasive positive pressure ventilation on the basis that he can at least have breaks from it where he can talk.) 

For weaning him off oxygen entirely, 60 hours / 7 days / 10 days. 

He's been tolerating the low rate of heavily-diluted tube feeds without difficulty, though, and his gut motility is holding steady with intermittent doses of the relevant drugs. They don't want to increase the rate for a while longer, but Treatment Planning is comfortable getting him working toward a clear fluid diet basically as soon as he's extubated and fully alert and able to swallow. The estimates for when he'll get there are 48 hours / 72 hours / 5 days. 

It'll probably take him longer for his stomach to be ready to handle fats and proteins, let alone enough of them to meet >50% of his calorie needs. The 20% / 50% / 80% spread for him to get there is 4 days / 6 days / 9 days. 

At this point, Kalorm dying during this hospitalization is going to take either a one-in-a-million fluke or an actual mistake on the part of the medical team – the odds of which should usually be lower than 1:1,000,000, medical errors causing patient deaths are a stupid problem, but given Kalorm's alien preference to minimize medical interventions and be observed as little as possible, they're more likely to miss something. The markets still think there's less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of a fatal complication. 

The current estimate on his odds of persistent brain damage is 56%. 

Merrin GLARES at the last number. She is in fact a little bit worried about Kalorm's recent mental status, though it's probably fully explained by still being on a lot of sedation, and Diagnostics seems to have made a positive update overall. She's kiiiind of brain-fried enough at this point that it's hard to parse numerical inputs. She really very badly wants Kalorm to recover quickly and smoothly and give her permission to go home. 

At 10:30 am, Halthis is going to want Merrin's help in turning Kalorm prone again; his O2 saturation is actually still fine, but it still seems better not to push it. Putting the cocoon panels on him is inevitably going to disturb him somewhat, and she's going to warn him first, but he doesn't actually need to try to stay awake for it or participate in the process. 

Kalorm is responsive enough to crack an eyelid open when Halthis talks to him, but no, he does not particularly feel like trying to stay awake. He drifts in and out; his eyes only fly open when he's being rotated. 

Merrin did warn him first but possibly he was too sleepy to be tracking that? She reassures him. He's very well secured and definitely not going to fall. (Just in case, they'll keep the additional securing straps over him so he can't possibly flail himself out of the cocoon if he wakes up disoriented and fighty again.) 

Kalorm does not do this! He sleeps through the next two hours, as the bed-cocoon gently rotates him from side to side. 

His blood pressure clearly likes the decrease in his sedation and pain medication, and they're able to get down to 40%-of-maximum on the vasopressors. His lungs still aren't letting them go below 45% O2 on the ventilator, but he's spontaneously taking deeper breaths at the set pressure support, often getting volumes over 500. Treatment Planning recommends easing down to a rate of 22; his CO2 is low. 

At 12:20, a few minutes into his scheduled IV antibiotic infusion, he wakes up very very unhappy. 

Merrin is in her floor chair, not directly under him but where she can see his face. She shifts closer. "Kalorm, hey. Are you in pain?" 

No! Kalorm tries to shake his head; it's annoying, his head is suspended in straps. He's not in pain but he's really nauseated! It's a weird different nausea, more located in his head than his stomach, and he doesn't particularly feel like he's actually about to vomit, but it's unpleasant and he doesn't like it! 

He's having a hard time figuring out how to communicate this. Gestures aren't working very well because his arms are trapped in stupid arm hammocks. 

"Kalorm, I can tell something is wrong. Are you having trouble breathing?" (Headshake). "Too hot? ...Too cold?" Apparently it's neither of those. "Okay, uh, I'm getting you the picture board to try." 

Kalorm is baaaaaarely awake enough to manage visual input and having to interact with the picture board is very frustrating. But he's pretty motivated to keep trying to communicate the horrible thing so that Merrin can make it STOP. It takes him multiple minutes to convey to Merrin which picture board he wants, and then manage to find the "nausea" image and then figure out how to point at it, but he does manage it eventually. 

Halthis frowns. "Your gut is doing really well so I don't think it's that." She toggles through some screens. "It...might be the antibiotic? That's a very common side effect, sorry. We'll give you something for nausea, okay? And the good news is that the infusion is almost done, so if it is that, you should feel better in an hour anyway." 

The milder anti-nausea drug doesn't get Kalorm all the way to the point of feeling fine, but it brings it to a level he can mostly ignore. 

He goes back to sleep. 

...Merrin is maybe also going to lie down in her capsule and attempt a Fake Nap, mostly just so that she can have half an hour of not being around people. 

She's back at 2:00 pm, lunched and water'd and bathroom'd, in time for shift change. 

Kerrin is so much happier with how their patient is doing today! 2:30 seems like a reasonable time to try him on his back again, see if he can handle 90 minutes this time? 

FINE, if he HAS to. Being woken up is terrible, and apparently Merrin doesn't think it's necessary to talk to him and remind him of everything that's happened and is still happening and then repeat it six times so that Kalorm can manage to get all of the words eventually. Instead, it takes Kalorm several minutes of struggling up through sticky layers of brain glue before he can manage to reconstruct the basics of why any of this is happening to him. 

Once he's awake, though, it's...a little bit easier to stay that way? He should probably try to stay that way, because Merrin, currently getting his limbs comfortably arranged on pillows, is looking at him sort of expectantly. Kalorm puts a major effort into dragging his eyes all the way open and raising his eyebrows at her. 

She pulls up a regular-height chair and settles herself next to him. 

"Looks like you're having a bit of an easier time staying awake, yeah? Think you can manage, like, fifteen or twenty minutes of being-awake time?" 

Only because it's Merrin specifically asking and she looks so hopeful about something and he wants to know what. Kalorm rolls his eyes, but nods. 

"Good. If you decide you're tired at any point, you can flag that and go back to sleep, but I was hoping we could start doing some physical rehab exercises today. It's been nearly seven days since your accident, and you've had a lot of setbacks but Diagnostics thinks you're past the highest-risk period for serious medical complications, and that you're stable enough to start working on building strength and coordination. It's probably going to be frustrating - you were really fit before, but your body took a lot of damage and it'll take a lot of effort - and time - to get back to your baseline. The 50% estimate on when you'll be up and walking at all is 5 days and you're probably going to need a lot of help and get exhausted easily for longer than that. But the sooner we start, the sooner we'll get there. Okay?" 

On the one hand, doing anything right now sounds very very hard. But it is, in fact, infuriating to be this bad at doing things. Kalorm very badly wants to be able to walk. If he can walk then he can, if he wants, LEAVE.

(He...probably won't actually leave the moment it's physically possible for him to do so? He's pretty sure that he's still in Default, and the only people he knows well enough to stay with in Default are his family, which sounds...possibly worse than being in the hospital. He's already lost on Not Interacting With Civilization, and it's not that much worse if he has to keep interacting with Civilization for a few weeks longer.) 

He nods. 

"Good! We're going to start really basic, because I know you're pretty sleepy on top of being deconditioned, so complicated instructions will be hard, and your heart and lungs aren't up for anything too involved yet. You might not be able to do any of the exercises unassisted today, I'll help you to whatever extent you need. Hmm. Do you feel like doing arms first, or legs? Uh, wiggle your hand if you want to do arms or your foot if you want to do legs?" 

Kalorm's legs feel approximately a thousand miles away right now and he could probably convince his foot to move but it feels a little bit like communicating across a lake using smoke signals. 

He manages to lift his hand. 'Wiggling' is apparently a more complicated motion than he thought. 

"All right, arms it is! Right. One thing we're going to work toward here is you being strong enough to reach up and grab this hanging bar, so you can move yourself in bed if you want to change position." It's a trapeze-like attachment on the ceiling lift equipment, hanging on straps; Merrin toggles the remote control to bring it down within Kalorm's reach. "I don't expect you're going to be able to do it yet, but for right now I'm going to help you lift your arms up and put your hands on the bar, and all I want you to do is hold onto it for a minute. I know that sounds really basic, but I think it's going to be less frustrating to start with really basic things that I'm almost certain you can do right now. Ready?"  

Merrin is right. That is very stupid to count an an exercise. 

Kalorm is, instead, going to roll his eyes at her and then try to lift his arms up by himself and grab the stupid bar. 

...How is he supposed to do that. It definitely should be a primitive action and it really isn't right now. 

Okay. Plan this out. He can start by trying to bend his elbow - okay, fine, just on the arm that doesn't hurt when he tries that - and get his hand up. 

This is really hard. Gravity is unfair. 

Hand up! Sort of! Keeping it there turns out to also be non-trivial. His arm is shaking really hard for some reason and so his hand is wobbling randomly. Okay. Next step. He needs to...do a thing with his shoulder...to get his elbow off the bed. Aughhhhhh. How do shoulders work. ...Maybe he'll try to sort of drag his stupid worse arm over so he can try to use that hand to help him lift his elbow. ...Owww that really hurts. Kalorm is going to keep doing it ANYWAY. 

Success! His elbow is now, like, six inches off the bed. Right. Maybe now he can figure out how to use his shoulder muscle to lift it higher.... 

He feels kind of out of breath? That's so stupid. He isn't even breathing on his own. He doesn't feel like he's dying, though, so - keep trying - his shoulder muscle is kind of burning and his entire arm is wobbling randomly and aughhhhhhhhh this is the DUMBEST PROBLEM but he is definitely not going to make it out of the hospital if he's too incompetent to use his arms - 

Merrin should possibly tell him to take it easier than this? He's turning red in the face and sweating and breathing significantly above the set ventilator rate. 

...She doesn't quite have the will to tell him to stop, though, he's trying so hard and it's weirdly adorable, and his heart rate is up to 120 but his blood pressure and oxygenation are fine.