Dave, Author at Epilepsy Dad

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.

Really, Who Needs Sleep Anyway?

If you follow me on Twitter (@epilepsy_dad) or Facebook, you might have seen this update recently:

Last night was first night in months where we didn’t get up even once. No seizures that we heard. No nightmares. No insomnia from the meds.

The bags under my eyes, however, are a telling sign that the status update represented an anomaly. Most nights, my wife and I sleep just on the edge of consciousness. The doors between our room and our son’s room are open so that we can hear any sound that he makes. My phone is on my nightstand with the baby monitor app running so we can hear and see him while he sleeps. We’re on watchful guard listening for a seizure, or for him calling out or crying because of a bad dream, or because he just doesn’t want to be alone.

On any given night, we might get up between 3 and 10 times, which means we only get a few hours of consecutive sleep at a time. It’s been like this for months. Our informal system has been that whichever one of us that is less asleep will get up, allowing the other to let their guard down a little more and drift a little deeper into sleep. It might only be a few minutes or it might be an hour, but either way, my body welcomes the break and release from constant tension.

When you have a child with epilepsy, especially if their seizures aren’t fully under control, a good night’s sleep is a luxury. Seizures don’t stay in a nice convenient box or stick to a schedule. They happen when they want to happen and, for many people including my son, that can be at night and during the lighter stages of sleep. The kicker is that those times are also when the body and mind desperately want to rest and recuperate and, since the seizures equate to an unrestful sleep, he’s left more tired. When he is overly tired, he’s more likely to have seizures during the day, as well.

I feel like I want to end every post with some variation of “epilepsy is more than just seizures” because it’s the overall theme of our journey so far. Seizures are a part of epilepsy, but there is so much more. There is a lack of sleep. There is a being on constant alert. There is dealing with the stigma, and the uncertainty, and the lack of understanding. There is the inability to explain any of it, to him, to ourselves, and to the outside world. There’s so much to living with epilepsy that it would take too long to list out even a fraction of the ways that it impacts our lives. But right now, my son has gone to bed, and it’s time for me to get whatever bits of sleep that I can. I will hope for another night without one, but I will still listen for his call…a call that I will always and forever answer.

Easier, But Not Easy

We’re two months in to the ketogenic diet. The doctors say that it’s working. We’ve been able to go down on meds without a significant increase in seizures, although the reduction was more due to my son being toxic on the meds rather than the gradual weaning of meds that sometimes follows the diet. But we also haven’t been admitted to the hospital in months, which admittedly is a pretty low bar.

His behavior is better, but it’s still bad. There is less screaming, and the outbursts don’t last as long, but they still happen. And his impulse control is still nonexistent. We’ve had to add a chain lock to our front door to prevent him front running out on the street, which he did. We can still see it in his eyes, when his brain gives up on making any decision and following natural impulses that, for a 5-year-old, involve flipping, and running, and hitting.

It’s still hard to look at him and to see him struggle. It’s still hard to do something fun only to have it end with a seizure because his body gets too tired to prevent it. This picture was taken at a festival in the park next to our house. About 30 minutes after it was taken, he was on the ground having a seizure, concerned bystanders offering to help.

In the past month, we’ve gotten help to come during the day. We’re also getting additional services through the hospital and through the state. We are getting better at managing. Managing his routine. Managing his seizures. Managing his behavior. The help and structure have made the day-to-day easier.

Easier, but not easy.

Like I imagine so many other families are dealing with, epilepsy has its own gravity that forces everyone to exert much more energy to keep moving. Every step is harder to take. Everything takes longer. Even the simplest things are exhausting. I wish I could grab my wife and son, strap on some rocket boosters, and break free from the unrelenting pull of gravity, but so far, we continued to get pulled back by more seizures or other complications.

Easier, but not easy.

There are families that don’t get easier or easy, and I’m grateful for the progress that we have made and for the support that we continue to receive. I’m still hopeful that all this will somehow, magically go away and that we won’t talk about the year when my son was five and he had all those seizures. We’ll skip ahead from his Disney World fifth birthday party to whatever we do for him when he’s six, and forget everything in between. Short of a magic wand to make it go away, I wish I had a remote control to fast forward to that time.

That would be easy.