Let’s Start At The Very Beginning
Our journey into epilepsy began on Easter morning. It was a beautiful day, the sun was out, the rain from the previous night was gone, and we had done all of our traditional Easter morning festivities. The obligatory picture waiting to start the egg hunt was complete, all the eggs were found and miraculously none were cracked in the process, Easter baskets were vetted, and arguably too much morning candy was eaten!
We had gotten dressed to go to my parents for their egg hunt with cousins and were trying to figure out footwear for the kids. Since it had rained, we expected we’d need boots since some eggs were hidden in the back of my parents’ yard which had not yet dried out. Declan and Aidan had their rain boots out, but Nate does not have a pair, so I’d confirmed with my Mom that he could wear my Dad’s (yes, he is 10 years old and wears the same size shoes as his Poppy)! Doug and I were gathering up the last of the items we were bringing from the kitchen when Nate came into the room. I was telling him that he needed to put on his regular sneakers and assumed he was not responding to me in true 10-year-old fashion. However, when I turned around to face him, he had a far-off look on his face. I called out to him as I was walking towards him, then called out to him again, and then again. By this point, I was right in front of his face. He was mumbling incoherently, pointing at his feet and drooling. The area around his lips had taken on a bluish hue. By this time, Doug had also joined me and was also calling to Nate to no avail. What felt like 20 minutes later (but was factually about 30-40 seconds), Nate came back to normal in a split second. He said, “Mom, I told you, I’ll get my shoes on”. Panicked, my first thought was that he had a stroke. We asked Nate if he knew that he wasn’t talking clearly and he said, “No, I heard everything you were saying and I was telling you I was going to get my shoes on.” We asked him if he was hearing and seeing us ok and if anything felt wrong in his body and he said that he felt fine and nothing was wrong at all, he just was tired from waking up early. Rather than going to my Mom’s, Doug and I planned to drop off our other two kids to my parents and head to the hospital. I placed a call to the on-call pediatrician from our practice and we packed into the car to drop off our other kids to my parents. Our other kids were worried sick as they were both in the kitchen during the event as well. Poor Declan has a lot of medical anxiety and Aidan was picking up on our concern as well. Suffice it to say the peaceful morning quickly turned to a stressful rush to get out of the house. We explained to all three kids that this was a precaution and that we were going to take the best care of Nate we knew how to by getting him to a doctor.
As we arrived at my parents and were explaining why we were going to take Nate to the hospital, we got a call back from our pediatrician. We explained the events of the morning and he asked a few other questions…what Nate had eaten, whether he was exposed to any foods he hadn’t ever eaten, how had he slept the night before, etc… Then he let us know that he didn’t think we needed to rush to the hospital just yet, that this was all the signs of a mild focal seizure and that we should continue to go about our day normally and monitor Nate. If it happened again, we should head to the hospital. He also wanted us to bring Nate to the office first thing Monday morning so they could do a preliminary neuro workup on him. Suffice it to say, we were definitely helicopter parents the rest of the day, and Nate had no more seizure events.
I took Nate to the pediatrician on Monday morning as requested, and our doctor did a full preliminary neuro workup on him, which didn’t show any indication of any immediate neuro issues that needed to be addressed urgently. He explained that focal seizures can happen out of the blue, and may or may not happen again. Our doctor suggested that we still go to a Neurologist for a more thorough and comprehensive neurology follow-up, and he also recommended scheduling an EEG for which he gave us a script. We left the office and I immediately called CHOP Neurology to schedule a visit, as well as calling to schedule the EEG, as our doctor had mentioned that both appointments usually were scheduled out far and in high demand. We were able to get our neurology appointment set for May 30, 2023, and our EEG for that Friday, April 14th, as their was a cancellation available. We all felt much better knowing that we were on the road to some answers, and were hopeful that the seizures would be a one-and-done experience.
