epilepsy dad

Category: meds

  • Not Having To (Always) Say You’re Sorry

    Not Having To (Always) Say You’re Sorry

    I grew up thinking that everything had to be perfect. Between the nuns at my Catholic school and my parents at home, I walked a very thin rope of perfection, calculating each step so as not to fall and raise the ire of either side. I wasn’t perfect, of course, and I probably spent just as much time suffering the consequences as I did running from them. Today, the legacy of that rigid black-and-white right-and-wrong upbringing causes me to be extremely hard on myself.

    A few weeks ago, we were putting ornaments on the Christmas tree. My son was enthusiastically picking up ornaments from the pile we made for him and rushing to place them on the tree. Inevitably, one of the fragile glass bulbs slipped from his tiny hands as he rushed to stand and it crashed and broke on the floor. “I’m sorry”, he said. I told him that he should be more careful and slow down, and he apologized again.

    epilepsy behavior sorry

    Lately, I feel like I’m always on my son and that he spends most of his time with me apologizing. It’s a terrible feeling for me, and I can only imagine what it feels like for him. What makes it worse is that there are many times when he can’t control his body. When he’s tired, there is a disconnect between his brain and his body that exacerbates the gap that is already present in an average six-year-old.

    I have gotten so used to dealing with him when the side effects of the medicine and seizures took away his ability to reason and control his body and I needed to catch everything before it escalated. Now, I can’t step back and let him explore and make mistakes.

    He must feel helpless to avoid my disapproving gaze and constantly feel like he’s disappointing me. “I’m not mad, honey, I’m just disappointed” is classically the worst sentence in the history of parenting, and I feel as if I’m delivering it with every dissatisfied glance.

    I’m not suggesting that there shouldn’t be any rules or consequences. Now that we’re back among the general population, I see other kids going without boundaries as their parents ignore them, and that’s the other extreme. It’s my job to teach him right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. But my response needs to be in proportion to the behavior, and I’m having a hard time letting go of those feelings I had when things were at their worst.

    One of our therapists offered a piece of advice that I am trying to put in to practice. She said that if he’s not doing something unsafe, and if what he is doing is not the end of the world, then take a deep breath and ignore it. Especially when an innocent action now feels like one that he did when his behavior was out of control, it makes sense that my alarms would be firing. But that doesn’t mean that every action needs a response. If he is being unsafe, or if he is breaking a house rule (no hitting, for example), then address it. But if he’s flopping on the ground, or his laughs turn in to a scream, then I should take that breath.

    I don’t want my son spending his childhood always having to say he’s sorry. What he is going through is hard enough, and I don’t want to contribute to squelching the bright, special light that is inside his heart by making him feel like he needs to be perfect. It’s my job to help guide him along the way to stay on the right path, but it’s also my responsibility to help him be happy and free.

     

     

  • Advocating For My Special Needs Child

    Advocating For My Special Needs Child

    By the time my son started kindergarten, we had gotten him off another toxic medicine and he started to settle in to the ketogenic diet and a new medication. His behavior began to level off and his seizures happened mostly at night. He still needed assistance during the day, special needs coming from a combination of seizures, behavior, and attention, but the district found him a one-on-one aide that could start the first day of school. Everything seemed to come together just at the right time.

    His one-on-one was not specifically trained. I’m not sure she knew what the details of the job were before the first day, so we basically told her that she should keep our son safe, watch for seizures, and help keep him on task if he has a hard time focusing or demonstrating a lack of impulse control. After a week or two, we started to receive feedback from the teacher that the aide wasn’t going out to recess with him, a time where having a seizure would leave him most vulnerable. We also learned that she was making him sit by himself during lunch on those days where his stomach was having a hard time with the fat in his diet and he didn’t bring food, leaving him to sit at the end of the table away from his friends.

    Instead of bringing it up to the district, we wrote a list of “expectations” with my son’s teacher and gave them to the one-one-one. She did better for a time, but it was clear that working with children was not her thing and that she was just showing up for the paycheck. There was no warmth, no compassion, and no attempt to get to know our son, but we let it go because at least she was doing something, and our son was doing so much better.

    His teacher and the class aide also did what they could, but in a class of 29 children, my son could only receive so much special attention. But again, he seemed to be doing so much better, so we thought, between the teacher, aide, and the extra body that was his one-one-one, that our son was getting enough support because he was in school, making friends, and learning. Things were on cruise control, and we let a lot of things slide.

    Last week, though, our son got sick. We already learned early on that epilepsy and sickness don’t play nice together. It was actually the flu that brought us to the emergency room the first time things got bad with my son’s seizures, and where we saw first-hand the increase in seizures that come along with the sneezing, coughing, and runny nose. This time, though, we had a good base of medication and diet, so we weren’t seeing a big increase in seizures, but we were seeing more attention, focus, and impulse control issues.

    This happened to be the same week where my son’s one-on-one took a different job. I was told by my six-year-old that his helper’s last day was the previous Friday. No one told us (or his teacher) the the aide had left, so my son was left to find his way in a classroom during a week where he most needed the help.

    The episode was our wake up call. The nurses and social workers told us before we started school that, especially with public schools that are desperate for funding, we would need to be our son’s most vocal advocates. But we got comfortable because things were going better than we could have imagined a few months ago. We let ourselves drift in to a state of dangerous complacency because of how well our son was doing and we stopped pushing for what our son needed.

    I haven’t been doing it that long, so I’m still learning what it means to be the parent to a child that has special needs. It’s hard enough to watch my son struggle with his epilepsy and related side effects. It’s exhausting to think about the level of effort that will be necessary to stay vigilant and ensure he is getting even the most basic services, nevermind what he needs to succeed. But like the many other parents that struggle every day to navigate the complicated, messy, and difficult world surrounding a special needs child, I’ll be loud and fight for what my son needs. Because if I don’t, no one else will.

  • In Good Times And In Bad Times

    In Good Times And In Bad Times

    I needed to clear up some space on my computer today, so I pulled up a list of the biggest files on my computer. Near the top of the list were a group of movie files with generic names. I clicked on the first one, and it was a video of my son that we made to document his behavior when it was at its worst.

    behavior side effects medicine seizure epilepsy father fatherhood

    I wasn’t prepared to see the video, and it really unsettled me. Even now, hours later, I’m thinking about the video and how desperate and scared we were. There were no answers for why he was acting the way he way. It could have been side effects of the medicine, or damage from the seizures, or a combination of both, or something else entirely. No one could tell us why it was happening, and no one could tell us if it would get any better.

    behavior side effects medicine seizure epilepsy father fatherhood

    In the video, he was having one of his typical outbursts. I say typical, but they were typical for where he was, but not typical for the almost five years of life he had before his seizures started. His brain would “go backwards”, as he eloquently put it during one of his lucid moments, and he would start hitting, scratching spitting, and screaming. The picture above was another symptom where his body would take control and he would somersault or flop around on the couch or the floor. The image at the top of this post was of him throwing a toy at me while I filmed the outburst.

    On a good day, we would only have a few, short episodes. On a bad day, we’d spend hours holding him down at bedtime. It was agonizing as a parent to see that happen to my child, especially when the outbursts ended with him expressing such remorse for what his body did and, I suspect, terrified that he wasn’t able to control it.

    Watching that video, the thoughts that I had lost my son and that his life was going to be nothing more than managing one uncontrollable outburst after another for the rest of his life came rushing back. The feeling of desperation, the praying that there would be some relief, some help for him, some help for us, came back, as well. After a few seconds, I was so overwhelmed that I clicked stop, a luxury I have now that I wish I had back when this was actually happening.

    When I got home, I told my wife that I had pulled up the video and that it upset me, and she comforted me like she always does. She asked if I had deleted the videos. I told her I didn’t, but I didn’t tell her why because I didn’t know myself. Am I keeping them to remind me of how hard it was so that I can appreciate where we are now? Are they clinical files incase someone, years from now, can explain to me what they were and why they happened? Do they matter, or should I just wipe them from my hard drive and let Time do the same thing for my memories?

    Tonight, I don’t know what I should do with those videos, but I did know what I should do with my son, which is the same thing I’ve done since he was born, in good times and in bad. I laid next to him listening to him suck his fingers as he started to drift off to sleep. I kissed him on the forehead and told him that I loved him more than anything, and that I was lucky to be his father.

     

     

     

     

  • Balancing Seizures And Side Effects

    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.

    epilepsy seizures side effects

    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.

  • Asking The Big Man For A Reason

    Asking The Big Man For A Reason

    Most nights, I ask God why this is happening to my son.

    We went in for our three-month checkup for the ketogenic diet and also saw our neurologist. The good news is that the diet is helping. The bad news is that his EEG looks worse than it did last time. The good news is that the neurologist thinks it’s because the medicine he was toxic on and that we weaned him off was helping with his seizures but there is another medicine we can try. The bad news is that we’re adding yet another medicine, and that the new medicine has some really scary side effects, especially if it is introduced too quickly.

    We knew this was coming. Our neurologist has been mentioning the new medicine for weeks now. We had hoped that, as we weaned off the other medicine, that the diet would have done more. But as his nighttime seizures increased, we slowly started to accept that the diet and the medicine that he was still on wasn’t doing enough. In the end, we opted to give him the new medicine, and his first dose was last night.

    My wife is out of town, so it was just me and my son. After I triple checked the literature to check how much to give him, I cut the pill, placed it on the counter, and watched him place it, along with his other pills, in to his mouth, grab the water, and swallow the lot.

    We won’t know whether the medicine will work or not for at least weeks, and he won’t be up to the target dose for months. That is, unless the side effects kick in, which would mean we have another set of problems to worry about. But maybe this will be the first medicine out of the 7 we have tried that he won’t have an adverse reaction to.

    God and I have a…complicated…relationship. We haven’t always seen eye to eye. Like my biological father, God and I hadn’t really talked in years and I rarely (if ever) talk about either of them. Unlike my biological father, though, He and I started talking again when my son was born. I thanked Him. I thanked Him for blessing me with a healthy baby boy. I thanked Him for my family. I thanked Him for my life.

    I still thank Him. What is happening to my son is a terrible thing. Like many parents, if I could take this burden from my son and bear every seizure instead of him, I would. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

    But even as I question the reason that this is happening, even as I wonder why this is part of His plan, and even though I wonder how He do this to a child, even though He may never answer, I still thank Him for the gift that is my son.