Trip to the ER

I'm still updating my blog. This happened on April 20th and everything worked out fine.

Hannah added Depakote, a new seizure medicine, on April 9th to the Keppra she is already taking. She did one dose at night for four days then went to two doses a day. Though I've been trying to avoid playing the medicine game my new thought process is that since she has more medicine Hannah shouldn't have any break through seizures. 

On Friday (April 20th) everything was pretty normal. We did a few errands in the morning then since it was a nice day outside we walked to Hailey's school to pick her up.  I noticed that Hannah seemed to be tripping over her feet more but thought it was because her pants are too long or she was running too fast or she's just getting tired since it's nap time.
Since it was close to nap time, Hannah was a little clingy and followed me downstairs to get paper towels. I ran upstairs to get lunch done (just mini corn dogs in the microwave) when I heard this strange sound like Hannah was gagging. Hannah was still downstairs distracted by Rachel's exersaucer. I thought she must have thrown up since she was a little bit sick and had snot in her throat (a common thing that Robert does).

I ran downstairs with the paper towel and found Hannah completely supporting her own weight but in a seizure. She had mild shaky and was a little bit responsive.  I thought that it was pretty strange but maybe her new medicine lessens the seizure now. I carried her to the couch with me to sit down (she is very stiff in a seizure which makes changing her position difficult.)

She seemed to relax a little and since her eyes were opened still, I asked her if she was all done. She nodded slightly and so I carried her upstairs to keep an eye on the other kids. Before I was even upstairs she was in another seizure or most likely just continuing the first one since they were so close together. It was just mild shaking so no big deal.  I hate that her lips turn blue but that doesn't make me as nervous as it used it.

Then she sat up, tightened her grip on me and started this awful screaming. Her seizure became more violent and the stiffening is a very normal reaction but it unnerved me. I started crying and trying to tell her that she's okay. I just repeated that over and over until I realized that I was trying to convince myself we were okay. I just wasn't handling it well so I called my visiting teacher who I just saw driving to her house. She came right over and helped get the kids their lunch. After a few minutes, I told her that Hannah's been in her seizure for 10 minutes now. I called 911 after that and they sent the ambulance.  Before the EMTs arrived Hannah's seizure stopped but lately she's been having seizures back to back within 10-30 minutes of each other.

There were so many people there. One guy was talking with me while another was checking her stats and trying to find an IV spot while another guy was assisting him with the equipment. There were two guys just sitting around. We had an ambulance and a fire truck at our house (a couple of people found me later in the week wondering if we were okay since they noticed the commotion.)

Though Hannah was out of her seizure, stable and her stats looked good, we decided to bring her to the hospital for further observation. Hannah was mad whenever someone tried to touch her so the EMTs couldn't get an IV hooked up. The IV is to get her medicine to stop the seizure. She has very deep veins that are difficult to find even for Primary Children's who work on small veins all the time. I am so glad Hannah did not have another seizure because they most likely would've had to drill in the leg to get the IV like what happened to her at 9 months old.

The hospital was boring since there was nothing they could do for her but wait and watch.  With the MRI scheduled for Monday (it was Friday) I had them do a chest xray to make sure she wasn't going to develop pneumonia again (if that happened she would have had to wait another month before we could do the MRI.) No other testing was done and her xray looked great. She had a peaceful nap in mommy's arms and we were discharged around 3:00pm, which was pretty convenient for Nate since that's right after Rachel woke up.

By dinner time, Hannah was talking, signing and was pretty happy. Generally it takes her a couple of days to recover after a lot of seizure activity.  Maybe this is another effect of the new medicine.