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Mom needing help and advice

Sat, 04/11/2015 - 22:41

I found this website while searching for information about my daughter's seizures. She has had 2.5 in the last three weeks. They are not fever related. We just had our second EEG, which both came out normal. Frankly, I don't know what to do. She just turned 8 months old. My husband had febrile seizures as a child, but grew out of them. Again, she has shown no signs of being sick, she hasn't had any fevers in about two months, and she is developmentally right on track and ahead of the curve in all areas.

She has distinct symptoms before she has them. This past one she looked like she was not feeling well the night before. She finally slept (you can imagine with teething how welcomed her sleeping was at the time) almost the entire night without needing to nurse. The next day my family described that she seemed really lithargic (just like she was just before her first one), she went glassy-eyed, and started to seize. Both seizures occurred in the morning before 10am, and were exactly 3 weeks and a day apart. The first seizure lasted around 3-4 minutes, the second 2-3. The first time she turned blue around the mouth, as she was struggling to breathe. Her eyes wanted to roll back, but it was as if she was fighting it. The second one my family said her eyes rolled back and she did not turn blue. After the first one she took awhile to come out of it and recognize me. Her eyes were shifting back and forth. After the second one she recognized my family member almost immediately, and was ready to play a simple hand game she always plays with this family member.

After her seizures she becomes ravenous! She wants to nurse. It's the way I look when I've gone 8 hours without eating. She is surprisingly awake for an hour or two, and then zonks for about an hour, then is normal for the rest of the day. I should mention she's not a good sleeper, as it is difficult to get her to sleep longer than a half hour during the day.

To explain the "2.5 seizures," we were shopping one day and she began to go glassy-eyed. I grabbed her immediately and nursed her. Thereafter she seemed to be herself (she is almost always happy, almost never complains, and has a very lively expression). I like to think we avoided one. After her second seizure I had the paramedics check her blood sugar level, which was normal.

I don't know what to do. I don't know what type of seizure she is having. Has anyone had any similar experiences? Any suggestions of tests that we should do to narrow down what the underlining problem is? I can't stand these. It's like she's dying in my arms.

 

Comments

What kind of EEGs were done,

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 2015-04-12 - 01:42
What kind of EEGs were done, did she sleep during one, have they considered a longer stay in the hospital? Are you working with a pediatric neurologist very familiar with seizures in infants? Some seizures can look different at different ages. Not being a good sleeper is probably significan, either in sleep deprived common trigger or as an indication of something more. Put together an approach with the right expert... if you don't have the right expert, getting one for your child's team is the next step.Just an aside.. many people feel seizures started out of the blue, it seems like every parent mentions that. Normal development is not a given for every child going forward with seizures.

A person can't have a part of

Submitted by just_joe on Sun, 2015-04-12 - 21:52
A person can't have a part of a seizure. It is a seizure period .One of the slightest seizures is an absence seizure where the person in it may look like they are in a day dream. Also Focal seizures can look like that too. So she didn't have 2.5 seizures she had 3.All a seizure is "is an electrical impulse going off in the brain causing a chain reactiom" Another thing yu need to kow is that the EEG can only read the electrical activity to a certain depth in the brain. If there is an abnormality deeper it will not show up on the EEG...I had a battery of tests run to see if they could come up with anything that was causing my epilepsy.  spinal tap, neuro-angeogram (MRI of the 1960's) and many others. The last test they ram was another EEG. I was tired because of th tests and not seeing Mom for about a week. In that EEG I fell asleep. While asleep they found what they needed. They found abnormalities in the left lobes of my brain. Now all the otherr tests had come back normal and every thing had been checked. By seeing where te activity was comming from they then looked closer at the MRI of the 60's and they found something that had been overlooked while checking it the firts time. The neurologists found scared brain tissue. So a longer EEG or one in which she falls asleep in might show more. The MRI shows everything on the brain and any deformaities in the growth of certain areas so yes that is going to be looked at closer. To gain a little knowledge go to the learn section and read types of seizures and types of epilepsy. The types of epilepsy are put together with symptoms and other things. I was diagnosed back in the stone age years  before neurologists went into specializations. I would also suggest yo uget the My Epilepsy Diary which can be found on many different pages at dome place or another but I do know it is in the Help section. The diary has a note pad in it  so oyu can note different things during that day. If she had a seizure and what it looked loike the time in it and time it took for her to get back to normal I hope this helps Joe

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