epilepsy Archives - Page 78 of 84

Balancing Seizures And Side Effects

Shortly after my son wakes up each morning, I walk with him in to the kitchen. I open up the basket that sits on the counter and grab his weekly pill organizer, popping open the compartment for the day. I use my finger to push around the pills and find the morning dose of anti-epileptic medication, pulling out six pills and placing them on the counter. My son, still groggy, rubs his eyes as I fill up a cup with water from the fridge and hand it to him. His little fingers struggle to pick each pill up from the counter, but he gets them all, puts them in his mouth and swallows them with the water. “Good job, buddy,” I say, as I rub his head and walk with him in to the living room.

This is how we start every day. Some days, it’s my wife that goes through the routine, some days it is me. But every day, it’s my son that wakes up and starts each morning with a cocktail of medication, and ends each day the same way.

Borrowing a term from my corporate life, getting onboarded in to the epilepsy lifestyle, one learns that 60-70% of people are seizure-free with the first anti-epileptic drug (AED). If the first medicine doesn’t do the job, there is a less than 10% chance of becoming seizure-free with another AED. After 3 failed AEDs, there is less than a 5% chance of becoming seizure-free with another AED. We’ve tried at least 7 medications, not including the short-term ones that were used in the hospital when my son went in to status or the behavior and sedative medications. With each medicine came a dwindling amount of hope but a compounding list of side effects.

Medication	Side Effect
Kepra	“Kepra Rage”; behavior
Trileptal	Exacerbated myoclonic seizures.
Depakote	Stopped along with dilantin because of toxicity.
Dilantin	Toxic, sever ataxia, other bad stuff.
Zonegran	Behavior, ataxia
Onfi	Suspect behavior, attention, balance
Depakote (Again)	Toxic (again)
Lamictal	TBD

The behavioral side effects are the hardest to endure…watching the chemicals that keep my sweet, funny son’s brain from seizing turn him in to something else. We fed him medication that caused hours of having to hold him down and avoid the spitting and punches and hurtful, angry words in order to reduce the number of seizures he was having. After two, three, or four hours, he might come back to us and we would watch him cry because he truly couldn’t control what his body and his brain were doing. It’s impossible to explain to a five year old what just happened, so we would hold him, and comfort him, and wait for the next barrage.

In the last few months, partly because we started the ketogenic diet, we have removed a number of medicine from his cocktail, and his behavior has greatly improved. But his neurologist added Lamictal last month to help with an increase in nocturnal seizures and to hopefully wean him off Onfi, which might still be causing some behavioral and attention-related side effects. There should be fewer behavior-related side effects with Lamictal, but getting the medication up to an effective dose takes time…what Lamictal lacks in terms of behavioral side effects, it more than makes up for with physical side effects of introducing it too quickly. Fortunately (knocking on wood), we have yet to see any signs of a reaction, so we will stay the course and hope for the best.

Celebrate Things Big And Small

Last week, we were visiting my parents in Florida. My wife and son were in the bathroom getting ready for bed when I heard my wife’s voice start to go up in a combination of nervousness and excitement before she let out a huge cheer. My son came running from the bathroom, mouth dripping with blood exclaiming “I lost my first tooth!” My wife followed, beaming, with the tooth wrapped up in tissue paper.

I stood up and gave him a big hug. Grandma and Grandpa came in to the room and congratulated him, and we all set about making the necessary preparations for the long anticipated tradition. Grandma brought in an envelope, which my son addressed to the Tooth Fairy (with love) and slid his tiny tooth inside. He finished getting cleaned up and rushed in to bed, eager to fall asleep so that he could wake up to see the bounty that the Tooth Fairy had traded for his precious pearly white.

During the last year, my son has dealt with so many obstacles that most kids will never deal with, but that night he experienced something that most kids get to experience. There was no cloud of epilepsy hovering over the event, no addition of the disclaiming phrase “because he has epilepsy” that sometimes accompanies other milestones. There was just a kid, my son, mouth bloodied with his tooth in an envelope, excited about the Tooth Fairy.

A few weeks before our trip, there was another rite of passage when my son rode his bike for the first time without training wheels. A great achievement, for sure, but amplified by the knowledge that there was a period in February when he couldn’t walk or talk, followed by months of severe ataxia where he would shake and wobble and fall. Those first ten feet of training wheel-less peddling reminded me of my agile two-year old boy zipping around our neighborhood on his balance bike, long before we had any knowledge of seizures and epilepsy and ataxia. My wife and I cheered for him as he traversed the park, found his balance, learned how to stop, and looped around trees. A couple near us that was watching him commented at how amazed they were that it was his first time. To them, he was just a normal boy out doing normal boy things. If they only knew. But for a few moments, we felt exactly the same way.

There will be many challenges in my son’s life, some because of his epilepsy, some not. There will be times when even good moments will have attached to them a caveat about his condition. It’s hard, very hard, to be present in those moments and not think about the past before any of this happened, or the future and its possible limitations. But it is my responsibility and my privilege to be present, to let my son know that I am there for and with him, and to celebrate all things, big and small.

One Year Of Seizures

This week marks the one year anniversary of my son’s first seizure. It’s not an anniversary that we are celebrating, obviously. But it has been long enough now that it’s hard to remember a time before seizures, but when I do…when I see a picture from the “before time”, when I talk to someone who hasn’t seen him since he started having seizures…it’s hard to make the connection between then and now.

His seizures started around the same time we moved from Colorado to Pennsylvania. The geographic difference makes it seem as if it was a different family back in Colorado. Their son didn’t have any seizures. The family in Pennsylvania, their son has seizures that are still not under control. The Colorado family was hockey and balance bikes. The Pennsylvania family’s son struggles to find his balance at all some days. The Colorado family had an infinite number of possible futures. The Pennsylvania family is mostly trying to manage day by day.

Most of the pictures of the Colorado family are gone from the shelves. They were too hard to look at. We didn’t see our son in those pictures, we saw another child living another life. After a year, that other life stopped being our present and started to become our past. This is our life now.

After a year, though, we’re slowly making new memories and celebrating new victories with new pictures that are making their ways in to frames and on to the empty shelves. This is our life now, and we’re finding ways to live it. We’re getting more help for him and for ourselves. We’re starting to go out to dinner, both as a family and on dates. We’re finding friends. We’re playing teeball. We’re going swimming. We’re going roller skating. We’re exploring our new home and making the days that we have count.

For all the differences…for how unconnected and disjointed that the two families seem to be, they do have one thing in common. The Colorado family had a tough kid that wouldn’t quit and that, somehow, kept a heart full of love through really difficult times. He lived fearlessly.

The Pennsylvania family’s kid is the same way.