Then This Happened.

This is an MRI of my father's brain. With an MRI they can scan his brain and create a picture showing bright areas that will allow them to locate areas that have been affected by stroke within the last two weeks. They will also show damage to the brain from past MRIs.
In the upper right scan you can see large amounts of white leaching into my father's brain, dotted with marks of black. The white is area of lost cognition, this is equal to that of an 80-90 year old brain. The black spots within the white of from past strokes that have damaged that part of his brain in those areas.
If you look to the scan just below that, to the one in the lower right, you will see what the newer strokes look like on an MRI. These come up as bright spots. In conclusion, these scans from early this morning showed the doctors that he has had at least 4 new strokes in the last 2 weeks time.
This can mean different things for many different people depending on the type of strokes, where the strokes are and how large of a stroke they have. The kind my father had were actually small ones, but because he was so limited in his speech and movement to begin with it doesn't take much to set him back.
This set of strokes added a new level of discomfort to his life. The most noticeable and painful is called spasticity. When they tried a recommended drug to get rid of the spasticity my father became so "relaxed", and out of it that he did not know anyone around him, could not react to anything happening around him, and had no gag reflex at all.
They have since removed him from this drug and he has slowly started to return to what is assumed to be his new normal, which is assumed to be non-mobile at this point. His speech is very difficult at this point and he still has a lot of trouble feeding himself.