In Which Connor Meets More Firefighters And Takes An Ambulance Ride

Short blog tonight-- I'm exhausted.  Instead of giving my speech last night, I was in the local emergency room until the wee hours of the morning.  That afternoon as I was literally walking out the door, Connor's respite care nurse called me back because Connor was having a seizure. 

And he continued having a seizure for the next forty-five minutes.

Thankfully he kept breathing through the whole thing or I'd probably be writing a very different blog post.  I gave him the Diastat at five minutes in, and at around fifteen minutes in the EMTs gave him a dose of Valium.  Neither stopped the seizure.  It finally stopped on its own well after we got to the hospital. 

It was one of the violent jerking variety, and I'm pretty sure he was aware during the whole thing.  I think it scared him rather badly, which is completely understandable-- it had the same effect on me.  The doctors suspect it might have happened because of the reduction in seizure medication a week ago.  They went ahead and raised the dosage of one of his other seizure drugs to try and curb the problem. 

Amazingly, five minutes after the seizure was over Connor was signing that he didn't want to be there and was ready to go-- the seizure and the massive dose of sedatives he had on board didn't seem to slow him down much.  His left hand was paralyzed for a while, but it slowly started getting some function back.  The doctor was starting to talk about discharging him for the night and letting us go until Monday, when we'd go to Connor's primary care manager, when the little guy threw up a brown, chunky substance that ended up being blood.  Fantastic.

Luckily his complete blood count still looked good so they didn't think he was massively hemorrhaging or anything, and the blood didn't look fresh.  However, it was pretty worrisome to see, though the problem didn't seem to be urgent.  I'm pretty positive that Connor didn't bite the inside of his mouth or his tongue while seizing because we didn't see any blood coming out of his mouth during the seizure, so it's possible that he has some irritated patches in his throat from stomach acid, an ulcer, or even just that his g-tube got yanked on at some point during the transport and caused a bit of a tear his stomach lining.  At any rate, we're checking his stomach contents twice a day to make sure we don't see any more blood, and the little guy will be heading into the doctor's office on Monday to see whether or not Connor needs a scope done to figure out the source of the problem.  Whee.

So that was not, perhaps the best day ever.  We got out of the hospital at Early 'O Clock, and today for the most part we spent a very quiet time at home.  Connor slept for most of it, and he's out for the count now.  Other than the hand issue and the whole internal bleeding thing, he seems to have suffered no ill effects from his prolonged epileptic state, which is a real relief.  It was not, however, an experience I'd care to have again. 

Ever.

~Jess