These pictures were taken around 9:00 pm Friday evening...
little miss adorable!
at 10:30 things suddenly changed and by 11:15, this was my view.
Tessa had a really rough week last week. Last Sunday she experienced about an hour+ of throwing up. We kept her home from school on Monday and she had a good day. We chalked it up to a less-than-24 hour bug of some sort.
She went to school on Tuesday, and then by Tuesday evening she was dealing with lots of drainage and coughing. With limited trunk and neck control, these types of experiences take an incredible toll on her little body. Her nights and mornings were the worst. Darin and I spent our nights doing everything we could to try and keep her comfortable...not an easy task. By the afternoons, she would have perked up after clearing most of the mucus out, but then it would start all over again every night when it came time to sleep. It was of course exhausting, but also devastating to be so limited in the ways we could help her.
Darin kept Tessa home on Friday in hopes to give her an extra day to her long weekend to help her get to feeling better. She had a really good day on Friday. She had an afternoon mapping appointment at Hearts for Hearing that went well and overall, did great that day.
We had a later-than-usual evening on Friday but as you can tell from the pictures above, she was all smiles and giggles even up until 9:00 p.m. at night. Shortly after those pictures were taken, she had all of her nightly meds and was fast asleep in her nap nanny.
Then around 10:30 we noticed something was off. She had opened her eyes and appeared to be needing to cough or like she was choking or something. Then she started spitting bubbles out of her mouth. It didn't take long for Darin and I to realize that she was having a very intense seizure. Once Darin had picked her up and was patting her back, we could see in her eyes that she was not responsive at that point. We immediately took her into our room and laid her on her side on our bed. By 10:34 we were administering her first dose of Diastat. We gave it the two minutes that we give it to work, and as she continued to struggle to breath, we immediately administered the second dose.
By 10:36 I was on the phone with 911. Beginning to end, we think the seizure lasted between 15 and 20 mintues.
The ambulance arrived promptly and Tessa was slowly beginning to breath more normally. She was still very out of it...not only because of the seizure, but now also due to the amount of medicine we had just administered. Our protocol to call 911 is due to the risk of respiratory failure after administering that much anti-seizure rescue medicine. It's not that we don't think the seizure will stop after two doses, so far it always has, but it's because we need medical professionals involved with monitoring her vitals after having to introduce that much medicine to her system. We also have no idea what things would look like if the seizure didn't stop after the two doses, or if for some reason she began seizing again even after the max dose of Diastat.
Although this is something we could never anticipate, we weren't completely shocked by the grand mal. It was a little surprising considering how good of a day Tessa had on Friday, but overall, she had been through so much in a week....exhaustion was an understatement. Her little body was spent and in such a weakened state.
Tessa's vitals remained stable. She was breathing well on her own. While we were at the hospital they ran a bunch of different tests to help determine if there were any underlying issues/illnesses that could have contributed to the onset of the grand mal.
They did a blood draw to check her organ function and blood cultures. They checked for a UTI, they swabbed for the flu, and did chest xrays to check for pneumonia. Everything came back looking okay, except that the lung xrays did show signs of viral bronchitis. This made perfect sense after the week she had, but we were so thankful that no bacterial infections had set in and we weren't dealing with pneumonia.
It was a very long night. The ER doctor consulted with Tessa's neurologist and after all of the testing they ended up administering Keppra in her IV and gave us instructions to increase her daily dose of Keppra from 5 mLs twice a day to 6.5 mLs twice a day. We were on our way home by 4:30 a.m.
Saturday and Sunday we rested. Tessa was still dealing with the viral bronchitis and we were still doing everything we could to keep her comfortable.
~Whitney
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