I have any amazing daughter, named Madison, who has the unfortunate diagnosis of epilepsy. She is a beautiful, courageous, compassionate, caring little girl. I truly believe that she was placed on this earth to touch people's hearts. Since she could talk, she would approach strangers and compliment them. Her ability to affect people is a beautiful thing to bare witness to. I tell her that she has a very rare and special gift of making people feel good, a concept lost to her age and innocence. She is susceptible to those in need of uplifting and she bestows kind words and affirmations freely. Perhaps i am biased, but i feel as though she has a purpose here to unselfishly and without reservation provide emotional connections with those in need.
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She had exhausted medications due to either suffering too many side effects or still experiencing intractable seizures. I brought her to see an Epileptologist at a university hospital. They recommended that she undergo a prolonged EEG, which would require her to be admitted to the hospital and hooked up to the EEG for one week. We had to take her off of all of her medications, without titration. Her type of epilepsy is exacerbated by lack of sleep and immune deficiency. They ordered sleep deprivation and constant activity to stimulate seizure activity. This is, to date, the hardest thing i have ever had to endure. To watch my beautiful princess slip away into an unrecognizable child. Weakened by the chemical change of the rapid cessation of her medications and the environmental stress, she could barely form a sentence, nor walk on her own. Her hair was matted down from the medical glue that attaches the EEG leads that were strategically placed and held by gauze encircling her entire head. All she wanted to do was scratch her poor head, but couldn't without sacrificing the integrity of the lead …show more content…
She has been in multiple therapies since she was a toddler. Having graduated from occupational and physical therapy, her language delay persisted. I always assumed that these delays were secondary to her debilitating seizures. Upon returning home and resuming normal activities, while still titrating up on her medications, i had a life changing eye-opening experience while at her speech therapy one evening. Her therapist came out after their session and informed me that she had just reached three of her goals that they had been working on for the past year, and wanted to know what was different. I was shocked, after having just witnessed her transition of being off of her medications and how that had left her appearing incapacitated. I hadn't recognized the normalcy returning in her due to the probable chemical stability that she was regaining. As we were leaving speech therapy and my mind was preoccupied with grasping a new logic behind her developmental delay, i reached the bottom of a long staircase to look up just in time to see her run down the middle of the flight of stairs. My heart dropped and i felt like a blinder had been lifted from my eyes. Everything came together and hit me like a ton of bricks. You see, i had never seen my child in her eight years run confidently down stairs, or even in a straight line. She has always required the assistance of a hand rail, and even then walked
She had exhausted medications due to either suffering too many side effects or still experiencing intractable seizures. I brought her to see an Epileptologist at a university hospital. They recommended that she undergo a prolonged EEG, which would require her to be admitted to the hospital and hooked up to the EEG for one week. We had to take her off of all of her medications, without titration. Her type of epilepsy is exacerbated by lack of sleep and immune deficiency. They ordered sleep deprivation and constant activity to stimulate seizure activity. This is, to date, the hardest thing i have ever had to endure. To watch my beautiful princess slip away into an unrecognizable child. Weakened by the chemical change of the rapid cessation of her medications and the environmental stress, she could barely form a sentence, nor walk on her own. Her hair was matted down from the medical glue that attaches the EEG leads that were strategically placed and held by gauze encircling her entire head. All she wanted to do was scratch her poor head, but couldn't without sacrificing the integrity of the lead …show more content…
She has been in multiple therapies since she was a toddler. Having graduated from occupational and physical therapy, her language delay persisted. I always assumed that these delays were secondary to her debilitating seizures. Upon returning home and resuming normal activities, while still titrating up on her medications, i had a life changing eye-opening experience while at her speech therapy one evening. Her therapist came out after their session and informed me that she had just reached three of her goals that they had been working on for the past year, and wanted to know what was different. I was shocked, after having just witnessed her transition of being off of her medications and how that had left her appearing incapacitated. I hadn't recognized the normalcy returning in her due to the probable chemical stability that she was regaining. As we were leaving speech therapy and my mind was preoccupied with grasping a new logic behind her developmental delay, i reached the bottom of a long staircase to look up just in time to see her run down the middle of the flight of stairs. My heart dropped and i felt like a blinder had been lifted from my eyes. Everything came together and hit me like a ton of bricks. You see, i had never seen my child in her eight years run confidently down stairs, or even in a straight line. She has always required the assistance of a hand rail, and even then walked