July

On the night of Monday the 21st Nate couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t unusual for him to wake up and cry, so the first few times it happened we calmed him down and left him to go back to sleep. His cries started sounding weird though, less pissed off and more scared, so I eventually stayed with him to rock him back to sleep. I was standing and swaying with him when he had the first seizure. He arched his back away from me and his head and arms were flung backwards as they started to spasm. It passed in seconds, then he started screaming. I initially thought a bug had crawled in his clothing or he had a hair tourniquet cutting into him somewhere, so I rushed him to our bedroom, laid him on the bed and started undressing him. Then he had another seizure.

10 minutes later we were walking into the Dell Children’s ER, and 3 days later we were leaving the hospital with a diagnosis of epilepsy. I’m writing all this many months later, so I can report he has responded really well to medication, which he takes twice a day, and hasn’t had a seizure since.