These days I work in more of an outpatient-ish situation (the bone marrow transplant clinic), but for the first 11 years of my career I was inpatient and my specialty was ICU and vented patients. Here are some of the things you need to watch out for in news reports, from which you'll get incomplete and non-technical snippets. Vent settings: There are several parameters which are varied to select the nature of ventilation for a patient: 1) Percentage of O2, anything from 100% to natural ambient levels; 2) Respiratory rate. The start of a provided breath could be triggered by patient breathing action, or be fully automatic with a specified frequency; 3) The "shape" of the breath. Ventilation profile (i.e. pressure graph) of a breath could be "square topped", for instance, which would mean instantly providing a pressure of X for the full duration of the breath -- or the pressure could build to a peak and then decline toward the end of the breath. 4) PEEP, or the residual air pressure left in the system after a breath which helps keep the lungs inflated. Patients with a lot of gummy infectious residue in the lungs would need a lot of PEEP. Cardiac patients like Hamlin wouldn't have many secretions like that. All of these parameters are selected by the physician and RT to optimize breathing while minimizing barotrauma (i.e. damage from over inflating the lungs. Hamlin, for example, started this adventure on 100% O2, probably because cardiac output was initially poor. As cardiac performance improves, levels of O2 could be reduced and still achieve the same ventilation. Last I heard, Hamlin was down to 50%. Sedation. With high levels of ventilation (elevated PEEP, high pressures, certain breath shapes) the patient can be very uncomfortable and must be sedated. Typically the sedation is fentanyl and midazolam, and levels will be such that the patient is OUT. But as breathing performance improves, sedation can be lessened somewhat -- the patient won't need to fight the vent as much. As performance improves even more, you'll be thinking about wanting to extubate the patient and let them breathe on their own. In order to extubate someone, you have got to wake them up first (or at least mostly wake them up). At the reduced vent settings appropriate for a patient about to be extubated, the vent action will seem more natural to the patient and they can certainly bear it. So I hear stories about Hamlin being awake and writing pretty coherent messages to the docs. That is an entirely consistent picture for a patient that is still intubated with reduced settings, but is well down the road to getting off the vent. Asking the patient questions and having them write answers is totally something that might be done to help assess neuro status prior to outright breathing trials. I have personally done this exercise many times. **** Sooooo.... I'd be pretty optimistic. The guy was down for a period of time on the field, but not THAT long. CPR was right away. The stories about him writing indicate enough neuro integrity to be thinking about getting off the vent. And the fact that they were able to taper vent settings in the first place tells me his overall cardiac performance has improved. All that sounds good to me, and remember this dude is a 24 y.o. football player, not one of my pre-compromised oncology patients. From the disconnected non-medical news drips on his case I've seen nothing so far that is nonsensical, and it mostly looks like a GOOD picture too.