Every Gray Hair On My Head

We went to Cairo for Thanksgiving and it was fine. Fine. Whatever. It was a big time with 30 people and then followed by the crabbiest trivial pursuit game ever (Mike's aunt kept referring to our team as the "brainiacs" and hers as "the normal people"--our team was Mike, his brothers, their wives, and me, vs. folks like Mike's cousin the veterinarian. Yeah...). Anyway, it was amusing. Cousins stayed over and watched movies upstairs and everyone crashed and all was well. We didn't have anything to do until 11 on Friday morning when we were getting a family photo done over in Mounds (or Mounds City, one of those). So my alarm went off at 8:45 and I just kind of lay there in bed not doing anything.

And then about 10 minutes later my sister-in-law Christy is screaming my name.

Because Maeve is having a seizure.

It was weird. Christy is, understandably, panicking, and Maeve is having a generalized (tonic-clonic--used to be called grand mal) seizure in her arms. She's choking. I take her, lay her down on the bed on her side, let all the saliva drool out of her throat, and, when Mary Helen appears behind me, say yes, I think we need to call 911.

It stops fast, less than 2 minutes total I would say, and she's out like a light. My heart rate hasn't even increased. It was so weird. It was like I instinctively just knew what to do and there we were and Maeve had a seizure and yeah, well. I know everyone else around me wasn't feeling that, though. The firefighter came upstairs and took her vitals and everything was ok and we waited for the ambulance. I didn't want to take her to Cape, the day after Thanksgiving in the ER (we would still be there in the waiting room, I believe). I told the paramedics as much when they came upstairs. Not in a forceful way. Just, "this is how I feel about this." Her vitals were good and she was semi-responsive to our voices. She rested, I signed away services (I could call back anytime, they told me, and if she had another seizure, I was certainly going to do just that).

She came around pretty fast compared to her other seizure. Had some orange and a few sips of water. Then she slept for an hour or so. We rescheduled the photography thing for 6 pm. And I started praying for the huge fever spike like last time.

It never came. She got up and played with cousins and was perfectly fine. Everything was hunky dory and I had to start reorganizing my brain from "she's having a febrile seizure" to "she's having a SEIZURE."

Febrile seizures, see, are benign. They stop around age 6 or so and don't turn into adult epilepsy. You don't treat them with anti-epileptic drugs. You just watch for fevers. Her last fever was febrile--the fever came second, so it isn't a classic one, but the pediatric epileptologist agreed with that diagnosis.

So this could be considered her first unprovoked seizure or her second, depending on how you view the first. And I won't bore you with the mental games I've been playing the last 24 hours. I reread my entry from the day we saw Dr. Vashist and I'm hopeful. It's been 22 months since her other seizure. In my mind, I think it's worth waiting and seeing. Yeah, sure, if she has another next week, then we're off to the races, but from what I've read, well, now I'm boring you with my head games. My goal is to try to avoid putting her on anti-epileptic drugs during childhood if at all possible. Vashist, well, this is what she does. I think I trust her, and we'll have to see. I'm calling Monday.

Mike's hunch is that the new carpeting in the attic here caused her problems--it already caused breathing problems for her on our last visit. At first I just kind of sighed and played along--they slept downstairs last night, for instance, but now I'm not so sure. I know off-gassing causes headaches and dizziness and so forth. Anyway. It's something to mention. I mean, if she's got a low seizure threshold to begin with? There is so much we don't know about brains.

So the day went on just fine until Leo figured out how to unscrew child safety cap on my thyroid medication. So that was a call to poison control (it was no big thing--he could have taken 100 times what my dosage is before it would be toxic).

Yeah. Good times.

I walked downstairs to call poison control and muttered to one of my sisters-in-law that Mike and I were like a traveling birth control commercial.

Happy Holidays.

The rest of the day was so lovely. The photography session was great fun; afterward we went to Bill and Sheila's new house, which is so nice and new and has a breakfast nook and nobody's mistakes to cover up and repair. AND SHE HAD BOURBON SLUSH. So it was a good end of the evening. That and a trivial pursuit game with no crabbiness back at the house with girls vs. boys.

I've done my reading, I'm ready for Dr. Vashist, I think it's all going to be ok. But damn. That Maeve is every gray hair on my head.