Sunday, February 1, 2009

Henry Made It 118 Days Of No Grand-Mals


Henry had a Grand-Mal about at about 1 AM today. I knew it was coming. We were upstairs, and he started to cry in a very urgent way. I ran downstairs and got an extra grain of Phenobarbital, I noticed Henry was acting blind and thought oh no.... He did take the Pheno. He really wanted to go downstairs. With me guiding him he started to go down the stairs, and at the third step from the bottom went into full blown Grand-mal and landed on his back/left side in seizuring position at the bottom of the steps.

I made sure he was reasonably safe at the bottom of the steps on the kitchen floor with a rug by his face, then went to the freezer that was only a few feet away and grabbed the ice bag. Unfortunately the ice bag was in one big huge clump and was useless. I tried, but no effect. I hated to have to bang up the ice bag to get it loose while he was seizuring, as noise and light is terribly aggravating during seizure. But the seizure kept going on, and I decided to go for it and proceeded to break up the ice, but it was just too hard, Finally the seizure did end. I didn't time it. The violent part was probably a couple minutes, then the other part was about 5 minutes. Felt like an eternity.

Note to self, ALWAYS make sure the ice in the bag is loose and on the ready!

I was very glad he was wearing the kind of jammies that have a velcro strip all the way down the back. I was able to very quickly unvelcro it. Light dimmer switches or soft lighting are very nice to have too during Grand-Mals.

118 days is very, very, very good. A few more days (Feb. 5th) he would have made it to 4 months which in all of his recorded seizure history he had never made it that long. With 118 days Grand-Mal free, he did beat any previous record he had.