Hospitals, Ice Cream & Baboons

Jamisen recently got some seriously quality overnight time with Mom and Dad ... and no little sister! He's been doing this "thing" with his eyes. Three different pediatricians/family docs have viewed the videos and so far we have two votes for Absence Seizures and one vote for Focal Seizures. Both are mild forms of epilepsy.

So, off we went to Children's for two days of testing. They were not on consecutive days thanks to some ball-dropping at the referring physician's office so we got to drive down twice to Seattle over a three day period. For one of the tests, the EEG, we got the last hotel room in town (literally, the last in town suitable to bring a small child to - apparently boy-band extraordinarily One Direction was in town and the entire town had gone completely mad) which is why Jamisen is sleeping on the floor. We had to keep him up until midnight which was a bigger challenge than you'd expect. Thank goodness the pool at the hotel was open until 10 p.m.

We can't speak highly enough about Children's Hospital. The centralized record system was amazing; everyone knew Jamisen's name and what he was there for and the staff read the same notes on the same computers.

Jamisen's first appointment was for an MRI. It was not a pleasant experience for anyone present (including Jamisen) to get him anesthetized. He fought us horribly; it was so traumatizing. I sobbed after it was done. And, then wandered off to get Starbucks since we had to play the waiting game. 

When he came to, he was super wobbly and didn't have great muscle control. He also seemed pretty sleepy.

He couldn't hold his juice box up that the Nurse's gave him, but, he insisted he wanted it anyways.

We got Jamisen's results from his MRI two days later and it showed that other than a stuffed sinus cavity, there were no abnormalities. That was expected but still a relief.

We took Jamisen to the zoo, courtesy of the hospital's kind program of making kids feel at ease about their visit. He loved all of the animals, despite being somewhat groggy from his busy morning.

Jamisen was super excited to come down a second night because he knew it meant ice cream for him. The second day test, his EEG failed to catch any abnormalities either so we're left playing the waiting game to see if his symptoms increase or lessen. At the moment, they're getting less and less, day by day, for which we are very thankful. We're also thankful for Grandma Faiola for staying multiple weekdays so Lily had early morning and late night childcare and to Grandpa Faiola for helping us navigate the strange paperwork and medical orders.