Friday at about 4 a.m., Evie woke us up whining. It wasn't unusual, but she had a temp of 101, so we gave her Tylenol and brought her into our bed to sleep. At around 8:15, she woke up and was babbling. And she started having a seizure. At first I thought she was just messing around, trying to get out of the bed. But when I looked at her, her eyes were angled up and to the right and she was drooling and twitching rythmically. So I knew it was a seizure.
Because of her history of external hydrocephalus, my first thought was it could be related to that so we called 911. We have a rescue squad literally two minutes away. She stopped seizing when we got her downstairs, so about a minute and a half possibly two minutes later. But she wouldn't look at anything, just stared off into space, and was sobbing uncontrollably. The ambulance came and I went with her to Columbia Memorial Hospital. They took blood, hooked up monitors and took her temp, which at that time was 102.7. So they gave her suppository Tylenol and waited. A few hours later, she was starting to look at me, but not really interacting or anything. The temp was still high, 101, so they had me give her oral motrin. After that, she began to perk up. They took front and lateral chest x-rays, looking for infection to cause the temp, took a cath urine (since she wouldn't pee for us despite drinking two cups of cranberry juice and water). All came back negative, but in the end, she had an ear infection.
The ER doctor diagnosed the seizure as febrile, which means it occured because her temperature spiked very quickly. It doesn't mean it got so high, but rather how FAST it got so high. These aren't THAT uncommon, one in 20 children will have febrile seizures, and they can run in families. I've been told that there have been some in Eric's family. We've been giving Evie round the clock Tylenol and Motrin, we'll be taking her to the ER for a re-check and she's on Amoxycillin for her ear infection.
So right now, all is well, but it was a long Friday morning and early afternoon. I ended up with a migraine from hell since I had nothing to eat, and only a teeny carton of milk to drink from Thursday night until 3 p.m. on Friday. Needless to say, it took until TODAY, Saturday, to squash that monster.
Evie's acting totally normal, for the most part, today. She's eating and drinking, so that's good. The rescue squad guy from the ambulance recognized us at the gas station later yesterday and checked in to see how she was doing. Nice to live in a small village sometimes. And the nurses at the ER wanted to meet Lily when I told them Evie was a twin, since they thought she was so good and cute. *She really was well-behaved, even after she perked up and was awake.*
That was our crappy Friday...thank God it wasn't anything worse and appears to be over.
I do love our new pediatricians though. I called the office when we got home and told them what happened and he got on the phone and talked to me about it, told me what to do if she had another and that he was on call all weekend if it happened again to call him. He also said we'd do an EEG in a few weeks/months just to be absolutely sure it was nothing else that caused it. And then he called back a few hours later to make sure things had calmed down and we were all right. Great!
Lily after we "washed" her hair with a rag. She had all kinds of oatmeal mess in that hair. I had to strip her down, there was so much on her!
Evie peering through a DVD case she got for Christmas.
Here is Evie eating a half a grilled cheese sandwich. We don't do this often, since they take WAY too big bites:
