I spoke with Rose Ann This morning, Pop’s nurse for this shift today, and she said Pop had an uneventful night last night. His blood pressure is good, he doesn’t have a temperature, and he is stable. His heart rate is running a bit low, but this seems to be somewhat normal for him. Rose said the doctors had not changed the settings on the ventilator, but that his blood oxygen saturation was currently at 100%. Perhaps this is a sign that the tracheostomy is already having a beneficial effect. The doctors have not yet started to do their rounds, and Rose said it looks like they will be running late again.

My daughter Kiera (Channel Man Stan’s granddaughter) will be graduating from high school tomorrow morning, and this weekend the focus will be on her. Kiera has just finished up a very successful senior high school year and has been accepted at the University of Rochester. She is enrolled there for the fall semester and is very excited about the college experience. Kiera also applied for and was accepted into the REMS program at the U of R. REMS is an acronym for Rochester Early Medical Scholars, which is a fairly elite program for pre-med students at the U of R. She was one of 10 students selected out of a very competitive field of over 1,000 applicants, and realizes that being chosen as a REMS student is a very big honor. Kiera plans on attending medical school at the U of R and the REMS program guarantees her acceptance into the U of R School of Medicine, as long as she successfully makes it through her undergraduate years of study and maintains a reasonable grade point average. No medical school applications. No MCAT exams. No stress about getting into a medical school. It looks like Kiera is on the path to being a doctor.

We are extremely proud of Kiera and her accomplishments and wish her the best as she begins her college education and future career in medicine. Congratulations Kiera!!!