Weekend Round Up

Wow! What a crazy week last week. Dad had major surgery to repair a herniated diaphragm on Wednesday, I had my thyroid surgery on Thursday, and Lily had another seizure while I was in the hospital. I think we have had enough medical drama to last us for say, another 30 years or so:-p
So - Dad is doing pretty good. The surgery was pretty extensive so he has been in ICU, but they are hoping he will be out tomorrow. My surgery went perfectly. The doctor was very pleased and told me I had a beautiful neck for operating on (gee thanks doc:-/). The biopsy showed no signs of cancer. They will still be doing a more thorough pathology that I will get the results of next week, but at this point it looks highly unlikely that they will find anything. I have much less pain than I was expecting and I feel remarkably good. Praise God!
Now Miss Lily. Lily had recovered very well from what we thought was a fever induced seizure (febrile seizures) back on July 30th. She obviously had some kind of virus because she continued to fight the fever for several days after the initial onset the day she had the seizure. She was back to her normal self and we didn't think too much of it. Febrile seizures are very common in little kids.
Thursday, the day of my surgery, she was her regular happy self up until about an hour after they took me off to surgery. At that point Mike said she went into major meltdown mode. He assumed that she was upset that she hadn't had her snack yet. Eventually he got her calmed down and was able to feed her and then she fell asleep. I was coming out of surgery by this point and it was as they were wheeling me into my room that Lily started seizing in her sleep. I was with it enough to know what was going on, but out of it enough not to care too much. I just told Mike to go and not worry about me because I was falling back to sleep anyway:-/ Mike immediately got her down to the ER and the docs took it from there. No fever this time and since it was her 2nd seizure in less than two weeks they automatically did a CT scan. Everything came back normal.
But now we are in a new realm of medical concern because we need to figure out why Lily is having seizures if they are not being caused by a fever. She will be seeing a neurologist this week and getting a complete MRI of her brain next week that will be looking for any abnormalities that could be triggering the seizures. Aside from epilepsy there are a whole host of medical conditions that can trigger seizures so we may be playing medical detective for a while. In the mean time, until we find out exactly what is going on, the doctors have put her on a low dose anti seizure med to make sure she doesn't have any more seizures.
Mike and I have a very, very strong hunch that Lily is experiencing what is called a Psychogenic Non-epileptic Seizure (PNES). It is basically a stress induced seizure. Even before Lily had her first seizure we had read a lot about internationally adopted children, who have come from hard beginnings, who have experienced these type of seizures. Many times they will be misdiagnosed with epilepsy, but eventually the doctors figure out there is nothing wrong with the brains of these children, it is the emotional and psychological trauma that is manifesting itself in the form of a seizure. It is especially common in children who do not have effective communication skills, and more common in girls than in boys. We will go through all of the testing just to make double sure, though.
To say that our little family has been stressed out for the past couple of months is certainly an understatement. We have done a lot of traveling, Lily's therapies have changed from in home to at facility, Lily has been experiencing tremendous physical and developmental growth, my health issues, Mike's new business, my busy work schedule, and it just goes on and on. It is amazing that we all haven't been having seizures!
Thank you all so much for your prayers and support. It means so much to us to know that we are not alone and that so many of you care so deeply.
Anyway - that is the gist of what is going on with us at the moment. I think you will all understand that we are taking some major steps back from a lot of our commitments in the coming weeks and just focusing on one another.