Cora's Seizures and EEG

While we were on vacation in Twin, Cora had two seizures (that I know of) that occurred on two nights back to back.

The second seizure: A few hours after I'd put her to bed she'd woken up and cried so I brought her into the living room and rocked her for a while. She had deep, slow, even breathing so I looked down to see if her eyes her closed. Her eyes were open and completely glazed over, she was totally gone from this world. I picked up her head and turned it toward me so I could get a better look and to see if she'd snap out of it but no response. This lasted about 5 minutes. The instant I saw her eyes like that I knew something wasn't right.

The first seizure: The previous night the same thing happened with her deep, slow, even breathing so I assumed she was asleep until mom said, "Cora, your eyes are wide open." I didn't think anything of this until the next night when the second absent seizure occurred. So I started grilling mom for some answers, she didn't respond, didn't wink, twitch, or move in anyway. It lasted probably about 4-7 minutes.

I've heard of absent seizures before with other children who have the same corpus callosum disorder as Cora. In fact, at her neurology appointment a few months ago in May I specifically asked the doctor  if she would have seizures. He said she has a 2-4% chance of them occurring and if she hasn't had any yet then she probably won't.

Technically, I don't know for sure if that's what Cora was experiencing because I was on vacation and no neurologist was there to witness and confirm it for me. Since being home, Cora had an EEG and I'm still waiting for results. The whole EEG procedure was awful, the worst preparation for a test I've ever done because Cora had to be sleep deprived for it. I had to keep her up until midnight, and then wake her up at 4am and keep her up until the appointment at 7:30. There are 29 electrodes and they use this gel and wax stuff to stick to her head and cover each one with tape. Then they wrap her entire head with gauze so the electrodes don't move and they hope she sleeps during the next 30-40 minutes while the computer tracks her brain activity. I'm not sure what they're specifically looking for or if she's supposed to have a seizure during that time to confirm that she did indeed have one. If they are, she didn't have a seizure that I know of but there are lots of different types of seizures.

Also a note for myself, about 2-3 hours after each seizure in Twin Falls she'd wake up again crying and screaming. I wasn't able to console her or calm her down at all so I just had to let her cry it out. I don't know if this was another type of seizure or not but it only happened after those two seizure incidents.

The EEG was awful and I will never put Cora or myself through that again unless her life depends on it. She had some crazy bed hair from all of the wax on the electrodes and you can still see all the little indents on her forehead. Poor girl!