I can think of few other things that are as disturbing to wake up to than the sound of my child having a seizure. Yesterday I had been expecting a second seizure all day long but somehow Calvin dodged that bullet—until this morning.
Throughout the night Calvin was restless, tossing and turning, incessantly rubbing his head in his hands in a semi-conscious state. I got up six or seven times to cover him back up. At five o’clock a sharp bark broke dead silence, though immediately I knew it wasn’t a dog, it was my son. The suspected seizure had arrived. After three minutes of upsetting convulsions, constricted breathing, spastic flailing and tremors we lifted Calvin from his crib together, our backs feeling the burden of his limp mass. We fell asleep, his feet tucked under my side, my hand draped over his hip. Forty-five minutes later he awoke to an insidious partial seizure—only a slight swallowing sound, his vacant roving eyes and a queer lopsided grimace giving it away.
Again, we decided to increase one of his antiepileptic drugs, a cousin of Valium, to which Calvin’s seizures have responded well in the past but to which he seems to habituate. I snuck downstairs to look back in my email records for titration instructions, then cut the tiny round pill into quarters, dropped the white chip onto Calvin’s tongue and chased it with a little water.
Now, day by day, we will sit and wait and hope, just like we have been doing for the past five long weary years. It’s all we can do, that is, until we have a cure.
And as I wrote those final words Calvin went into another seizure.
Throughout the night Calvin was restless, tossing and turning, incessantly rubbing his head in his hands in a semi-conscious state. I got up six or seven times to cover him back up. At five o’clock a sharp bark broke dead silence, though immediately I knew it wasn’t a dog, it was my son. The suspected seizure had arrived. After three minutes of upsetting convulsions, constricted breathing, spastic flailing and tremors we lifted Calvin from his crib together, our backs feeling the burden of his limp mass. We fell asleep, his feet tucked under my side, my hand draped over his hip. Forty-five minutes later he awoke to an insidious partial seizure—only a slight swallowing sound, his vacant roving eyes and a queer lopsided grimace giving it away.
Again, we decided to increase one of his antiepileptic drugs, a cousin of Valium, to which Calvin’s seizures have responded well in the past but to which he seems to habituate. I snuck downstairs to look back in my email records for titration instructions, then cut the tiny round pill into quarters, dropped the white chip onto Calvin’s tongue and chased it with a little water.
Now, day by day, we will sit and wait and hope, just like we have been doing for the past five long weary years. It’s all we can do, that is, until we have a cure.
And as I wrote those final words Calvin went into another seizure.
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| seizures and their auras |
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