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Hospital protocol for 5 year old grand mal seizure
Wed, 04/26/2017 - 21:56Topic: Living With Epilepsy - Youth
My son had a grand mal seizure at preschool today. He's never had one before. He has brain abnormalities due to traumatic chikdbirth and we suspect possible spectrum disorder.
My question is this. When I got to the school the paramedics had him strapped into the ambulance. He had passed out for 20 seconds then had a full body seizure that lasted for forty seconds. He was awake but lethargic and quiet when I got there. They told me he needed to go to the hospital, we went via ambulance. At the hospital I gave them his full neuro background and requested they ask for copies of his records from the children's hospital. Instead they monitored him for 45 minutes, gave him juice, and discharged him.
They did no scans, no tests, nothing. Is this normal??
Comments
emergency depts are for
Submitted by Amy Jo on Wed, 2017-04-26 - 23:48
emergency depts are for treating emergencies. his seizure had stopped so it wasn't an emergency. the right follow up is to work with a pediatric neurologist/epileptologist if you don't already have one. make sure you ask if he should get emergency interventional meds to treat a non stop seizure (essentially a seizure that continues 5min or a time recommended by the neuro, our instructions say call ems by 4 min mark as haven't seen tonic clonics so far). there is nothing super fast about diagnosing epilepsy except that frequently minor seizures go unnoticed until a bigger seizure hits, lots of people start to get tests after a bigger seizure. there is no definitive test for epilepsy so what could ED do? clear eegs do not rule out epilepsy and if your doc says that, that doc is probably not a neurologist who deals with seizures. kid seizures and epilepsy syndromes can be very different from adult seizures, another reason to avoid hospital not specialized in kids - for some issues we go only to children's hospital.
if there were no known brain
Submitted by Amy Jo on Wed, 2017-04-26 - 23:48
if there were no known brain issues, they probably would have done a CT and some blood tests but CT machines at adult hospitals give higher radiation dose than kids should have, children's hospitals often have better protocol to reduce radiation with fewer slices and lower power used.
emergency depts are for
Submitted by Amy Jo on Wed, 2017-04-26 - 23:43
emergency depts are for treating emergencies. his seizure had stopped so it wasn't an emergency. the right follow up is to work with a pediatric neurologist/epileptologist if you don't already have one. make sure you ask if he should get emergency interventional meds to treat a non stop seizure (essentially a seizure that continues 5min or a time recommended by the neuro, our instructions say call ems by 4 min mark as haven't seen tonic clonics so far). there is nothing super fast about diagnosing epilepsy except that frequently minor seizures go unnoticed until a bigger seizure hits, lots of people start to get tests after a bigger seizure. there is no definitive test for epilepsy so what could ED do? clear eegs do not rule out epilepsy and if your doc says that, that doc is probably not a neurologist who deals with seizures. kid seizures and epilepsy syndromes can be very different from adult seizures, another reason to avoid hospital not specialized in kids - for some issues we go only to children's hospital.