My first hospital stay

I've been putting off blogging about this. A sick child is not easy to write about, and this round with Sydney has been the hardest Drew and I have had to deal with. But I think it's important to document, though I'll save the long, detailed account for our personal archives. So here's a very annotated version of what we dealt with this past week:

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Backing up a bit...
You might recall my post from last October about Syd's first febrile seizure, a convulsion caused by a rapid spike in temperature and, we learned, common in young children. Well, the week after her birthday last month, she had another one. This time, we knew she was sick and we were able to anticipate it coming on.

Even as it happened, a part of me assimilated the fact that our reaction to the seizure had changed dramatically. The first one a year ago was the most terrifying thing I'd ever witnessed, in part because I had no 'whys' behind it. Now our response was less panicked, more observant ... analytical. Armed with information and experience, we knew to watch the clock, to turn her head to the side to keep her from aspirating, to look for symmetry in the movement of all her appendages. A small difference, but a critical one. One long ER visit later, the cause was determined to be a mild urinary tract infection, and I told Drew, "Ok, one of these a year I can handle."

If only we'd been so lucky.

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Fast forward to Thursday the 15th.
Not even four weeks later, another fever hit, and with it came two more seizures, less than five hours apart. With this episode, we crossed the line from simple febrile seizures to complex febrile seizures since she had now experienced more than one in a 24-hour period. On our pediatrician's advice, we admitted Sydney into the pediatric ward at Emanuel Hospital that evening.

Over the course of her hospital stay, Sydney had two additional seizures, causing us a great deal of alarm as you might imagine. Four seizures in 25 hours...yeah, not our best day on record. Her doctors this time diagnosed the cause of the fever (thus, the febrile seizures) as an ear infection resulting from a ruptured eardrum.

After allowing some time for an antibiotic to take effect, and after 24 hours seizure-free, they discharged her from the hospital around noon Saturday. We were so glad to get her home: she hadn't really eaten or slept for more than three hours at a time in three days. Not to mention the increased risk of infection or illness you risk picking up at the hospital in this swine flu-ridden era, especially in a shared room as we had. She was going nuts in there. You never want to see your child in a hospital...God be with those parents whose children are there chronically. I can't even imagine.

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Where do we go from here?...
We left the hospital with a syringe of medicine to administer that will stop a future seizure in its tracks. And while it feels good to have a plan in place, something just hasn't felt quite right about this whole thing. Each time she's experienced these seizures, there's been no underlying cause sufficient enough to produce these raging fevers. The answers haven't felt settling, a feeling echoed by our pediatrician.

At our follow-up appointment with him on Monday, he voiced another possibility: a condition called periodic fever syndrome, where fevers crop up for unknown reasons and then leave the body susceptible to other infections. The ironic twist in Sydney's case is that she's also got this propensity toward the seizures, so it's just a darned unlucky combination. Whether this is the answer, we don't know, but it is treatable. We're going to wait until her next bout - if one occurs - to try and figure out if that's what we're dealing with.

"In the midst of it all..." - as Pastor Ron Mehl always said - God is watching and protecting. Among so many other things, we are grateful that we were with her when the seizures occurred (my trip to New York happened to fall smack between both episodes, a timing miracle not lost on us); that we have a very low maintenance, easy-going little boy who didn't mind being away from us for a few days, for the loving support of family and friends, and for a pediatrician we can't say enough about. Dr. Moshofsky is so competent, so genuinely vested in Sydney's health and in our well-being as her parents, an understanding partner in our concern, and a fellow believer who is praying for wisdom and for our little girl!