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Newly Diagnosed, Quickly Diagnosed...

Thu, 12/18/2014 - 15:49

Well we're new here, yesterday my 7 year old son was diagnosed with epilepsy...the diagnosis seems sudden to me (not unusual given his medical history just sudden). I'm wondering if there are other parents out there whose kids had one or two seizures in a year, saw a neurologist, and were immediately diagnosed with epilepsy? 

In May of this year we had a grand mal seizure that lasted around 5-6 minutes, just a few weeks ago he had a petite mal (maybe the description was lacking because dad only caught the end of it) that landed us in the hospital for an EKG, EEG, MRI, and Echocardiogram. Before we were discharged the doctor (who was incredible) told us we were looking at one of two things probably - a seizure disorder or syncope. The MRI and EEG came back "normal", the echocardiogram showed minor thickening of the aorta and a weak valve, but neither were considered "medically relevant." So we were asked to follow up with a specific cardiologist and neurologist. We haven't heard from the cardiologist yet, but like I said we saw the Neurologist yesterday for maybe 20 minutes and left with a diagnosis of epilepsy and a prescription for Trileptol. I'm confused, I'm concerned...I'm worried about the effect of the medication on my son...you know, all that normal stuff...but it mostly bugs me that the diagnosis was so vague and so fast...any advice or stories similar would be a great help! And anybody familiar with syncope with advice would be awesome too because despite my lack of medical knowledge I haven't ruled that out yet!

Thanks!

Lacy

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