I’m sorta wound tight tonight because way too many stressful things have happened and I’ve just now finally ended my day. 

I’ve not even begun to process anything and I don’t think I even wrote at all yesterday.

My goal is to keep this short and sweet (but that probably won’t happen) because I’m exhausted and I have a shit ton of things to do after the boys get off to school in the morning. 

Of everything that happened, this is the one I’m most consumed with right now. 

It appears that Elliott is having seizures.

There’s a long drawn out explanation for how I came to this realization and I’ll try to keep it brief. 

I went to the school to pick Emmett up and take him to OT/PT.  I’ve been leaving Elliott at school cause my Mom will pick him up and that way he’s not missing the end of the day.  Plus he hates having to sit for 1.5 hours while Emmett’s in therapy. 

As I walked in the door, I saw Elliott in the hall with his teacher. He was visibly upset and so I just headed in his direction. 

At this point, he’s sobbing and his teacher seemed to view this as a behavioral issues and wasn’t exactly handling it in a way that I was happy with.  She turned him over to me and went back to the classroom but that’s a battle for another day. 

Elliott wanted to leave with me and Emmett.  He was begging me to take him with me. 

His sobbing grew to the point where he was hysterical and truthfully, I just wanted to scoop him up and run away.

I’ve never seen him like this and that concerned me. 

He completely disrupted the first floor of the school and additional people had to get involved to help calm him down.  They really did well with him. 

This was not a behavioral issue he was panicked and completely over the edge. 

There was no reasoning with him and it got to the point where the secretary was sorta looking me in the eyes and having to tell me everything was going to be okay because I was getting freaked out. 

I suspected that he was too warm in the sweatshirt he insisted on wearing to school.  He didn’t have a shirt underneath and so he couldn’t cool off. 

Maybe this had to do with him having a really emotionally distressing weekend?

But nothing is ever that simple, at least not in my life. 

Elliott managed to tell me that he was fine until he got a fuzzy headache. After that he wanted to go home. 

Bottom line.  Elliott ended up finishing the day.  He stayed in the office with the secretary and some of the staff.  They are truly amazing people and after a little while, he went back to class. 

There was only an hour let in the day anyway. 

Everyone said that leaving him there was the right thing to do but it totally ripped my heart out to do so and it did feel like the right thing to do.

Afterwards it occurred to me that he may have had an absent seizure and the panic/hysterical whatever that was, may have been the postictal phase afterwards. 

The postictal state is the altered state of consciousness after an epileptic seizure. It usually lasts between 5 and 30 minutes, but sometimes longer in the case of larger or more severe seizures, and is characterized by drowsiness, confusion, nausea, hypertension, headache or migraine, and other disorienting symptoms. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

As it turns out, he’s been getting these fuzzy headaches recently but never said anything because he says they don’t last longer than a minute.

Apparently they don’t hurt like a headache either. He says his head just feels funny and his eyes have to adjust. 

This is actually entirely plausible because he had a seizure when he was younger and that prompted an EEG. 

The EEG showed that his brain was primed for seizures, especially when exposed to flashing lights.  Akron Children’s Hospital said that people with epilepsy have certain things in place that makes them vulnerable to seizures. 

Elliott has all those things, whatever they are, only at the time, wasn’t having seizures.

Gavin was diagnosed with epilepsy about the say time, so the family history is there.  Plus, my youngest sister dealt with seizures when she was younger as well.

This isn’t entirely unexpected but frankly, with everything that’s been going on with Gavin and then my wife leaving, I sorta forgot about it. 

I’m not freaking out about this.  Okay, I’m not entirely freaking out about this.  I’ve talked it over with his Mom and we both agree that this is a concern. 

I was a medic for a long time and treated plenty of patients with seizures.  It’s not like I don’t have experience with this but it’s entirely different when it’s your kids. 

My first step is to get him into the pediatrician cause he needs to go anyway and then get a referral to the main hospital. 

His neurologist sorta disappeared and so he needs a new one.  I’m hoping taking this approach will expedite things a little bit. 

The rest of the day pretty much went straight down the toilet but we lived to fight another day.  That’s got to count for something, right?

This site is managed almost exclusively from my Samsung Galaxy Note 5. Please forgive any typos as auto-correct HATES me. 😉

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