Epilepsy Diary

Stacy has been doing well since her return home from the hospital. She is taking her Dilantin diligently and has only had an occasional jerk. Her mind is sharp and does not appear to have any hangover from the seizures that sent her to the hospital.

She is still sticking with the GARD diet although she is trying to limit the amount of fruit that she eats as she is sensitive to simple sugars. She is mostly eating eggs, fruit, salads, cooked vegetables (with brown rice occasionally), fish and chicken right now.

Well, Stacy was very determined that her new diet experiement was going to work immediately and decided to start taking 100mg of Dilantin at night instead of the 300mg that she had been taking in spite of my most stringent objections, pleas and arguments. I asked her to give her body some time to adjust to the new diet and start weaning off the Dilatin in several weeks if the diet helped her achieve control of her somewhat daily jerk seizures.

In any event, she felt great Monday through Wednesday and only jerked one time. Unfortunately, she had a grand mal/TC seizure Wednesday night around 3:30am. She proceeded to have 6 more grand mal/TC seizures just about 20 minutes apart. She never regained consciousness between the seizures. I called 911 around 5:30am after the 7th consecutive seizure.

She had one more seizure in the ambulance on the way to the ER room. They gave her a shot of something – I don’t remember the name of it – and said it helped cut the seizure short. Once in the ER, they hooked her up on an IV and gave her Cerebrex again.

The initial blood test they ran showed that Stacy’s blood Dilantin level was a “3″. The doctor said it should have been between “10″ and “20″ for a therapuetic dose. The staff at the hospital somewhat remembered us from our first trip there last November. Fortunately, they agreed that she didn’t need another round of X-Rays, CT scans, MRIs, etc. They just helped her get her Dilatin levels back up.

She was admitted to the hospital from the ER and spent the night there. She was released this morning and is functional but moving slowly today.