Hazelnut Lattes, Sunsets and Dad

There is an art of getting seizure medicine precisely right.  The art falls somewhere between chemistry and fantasy. There is a place where the person who has seizures has things well enough under control they can live reasonably normal life without big problems like grand mal seizures or smaller problems like body twitches, jerks, shakes and dizziness.  Teresa had been at the precisely right place for many years and then things just didn't work anymore.

The doctors asked us to chart things that they noticed like twitches or jerks.  So we wrote down daily notes of what we saw and faithfully brought them to the various doctor appointments.  We met several doctors who shook our hands to say hello and then would pass us off to another as they left for a different assignment. 

And after a year and a half of charting and losing the notebook during a hospital stay for a bleeding episode, we finally got our wish which was to have an in-house EEG observation at the regional epilepsy center.

What we found out was this.  Hospitals have lots of fancy equipment, technicians and doctors who are all very curious what would happen if they used their equipment to try to gather more data.  They wore tennis shoes with special soles so they could run really fast if you needed them.  That's all we found out.

Teresa still talks about the great hazelnut latte I would bring her in the morning when I would leave for work after staying there at night.  Her sister stopped by every day after work and they watched the sunset from her hospital room.  Teresa's dad was there all day, every day, watching and waiting along with the monitoring camera that was observing her.  Having some familiar faces and beverages made the stay almost tolerable.  Almost.  I can't really count any of those days Teresa spent during this observation as good days for any of us, but there were a few good minutes in there.